Foreign investors are often skeptical toward the quality of the domestic institutions and the enforceability of the law in developing countries. Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) guarantee certain standards of treatment that can be enforced via binding investor-to- state dispute settlement...

Bilateral investment treaties (BITs) have become the most important legal mechanism for the encouragement of foreign direct investment (FDI) in developing countries. Yet practically no systematic evidence exists on what motivates capital-exporting developed countries to sign BITs earlier with...

A number of recent studies have illustrated the link between health and growth (Gallup and Sachs 2000, McCarthy et al. 2000, Bhargava et al. 2000). This paper argues that a key mechanism through which health affects growth is via total factor productivity (TFP). We first estimate TFP based on a...

This article analyzes the impact of HIV/AIDS on the global convergence in life expectancy as well as infant and child survival rates by comparing two scenarios. One is based on actual estimated and extrapolated values given the existence of the epidemic (‘AIDS- scenario’). The other is based...