This paper explores the causes of India's productivity surge around 1980, more than a decade before serious economic reforms were initiated. Trade liberalization, expansionary demand, a favorable external environment, and improved agricultural performance did not play a role. We find evidence...

The First Millennium Development Goal (MDG#1) is to cut the fraction of global population living on less than one dollar per day in half, by 2015. Foreign aid financed investments may contribute to the attainment of this goal. But how much can aid be reasonably expected to accomplish? A...

Over the last thirty years Burundi's low economic growth has led to a significant decline in per capita GDP. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on supply-side constraints that prevented Burundi's economy from growing faster. Lack of investment, civil conflict, economic inefficiencies,...

The paper reviews the “stylized facts” on economic growth gathered by Easterly and Levine in their 2001 joint paper and illustrates some of the points made on the basis of data from the IMF’s World Economic Outlook on real growth and per capita GDP since 1970. The data show that the growth...

Swiss growth performance in the past quarter century has been mediocre. The paper finds that conditional income convergence contributes significantly to slow growth and the poor performance of the domestically oriented sectors has been a drag on growth. However, slow growth is not inescapable....

This paper investigates empirically the sources of aggregate output growth and the determinants of total factor productivity (TFP) in Niger between 1963 and 2003. A growth accounting analysis indicates that the erosion in output per capita over the sample period is due to the negative growth of...

This paper reexamines the empirical relationship between financial development and economic growth. It presents evidence based on cross-section and panel data using an updated dataset, a variety of econometric methods, and two standard measures of financial development: the level of liquid...

The purpose of this paper is to examine factors that have constrained South Africa's growth since the end of apartheid by comparing its GDP components and its saving and investment performance with those of 10 faster-growing countries. The study finds that sluggish investment has undermined...

This paper evaluates what type of models can account for the recent episodes of output drops in Latin America. I develop an open economy version of the business cycle accounting methodology (Chari, Kehoe, and McGrattan, 2007) in which output fluctuations are decomposed into four sources: total...

This paper evaluates the impact of the sociopolitical crisis in Côte d'Ivoire on the economies of its neighbors. Using a nonsubjective weighted index of regional instability in cross-country time-series regressions, it shows that the increase in regional instability caused by domestic...