Germany remains Europe's largest and most diversified source of new technology, but still lags in the fastest growing areas of today's high technology. After World War II, West-German technology policy sought to rebuild the institutions which had supported Germany's leadership in the high-tech...

We consider whether Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries are mainly poor because they are governed worse than other countries, as suggested by recent studies on the supremacy of institutions. Our empirical results show that the supremacy of institutions does not hold. SSA countries appear to face...

We explore the uses of double-calibrated general equilibrium models as a decomposition tool for analysing contributory factors in the growth and increasing wage inequality in an advanced economy (the UK) since 1979. Calibration of a model to start and end years, based upon an assumed functional...

This paper addresses the poor economic performance of Eastern Europe in the 1990s and the future development potential of the region in the light of the theories of economic growth and human capital and their empirical tests. It concludes that Eastern Europe is likely to have fallen into a...

We estimate the relative roles of factor inputs and productivity in explaining the level of economic development, which is measured as output per worker. For a large sample of countries, we show that alternative identifying productivity assumptions and alternative measures of human capital have...

This paper is a preliminary appraisal ofthe stylised facts and the major open questions - both methodological and Substantive - that have emerged in the empirical literature on international per-capita income and productivity convergence. On basis of various distinctivc lines of reasoning, it is...

I reconsider the primacy of institutions over geography as an explanatory factor of cross-country differences in economic performance, which has recently been postulated by Acemoglu et al. (2001) and others. My estimates show that the reported missing direct performance effects of a measure of...

We combine the augmented Solow model with the Mincer equation to derive a specification that identifies an education externality within a production function framework. The previous empirical literature has not reached a consensus about the size of the education externality, which is given by...

In diesem Arbeitspapier wird die Hypothese untersucht, dass die gesamtwirtschaftliche Leistungsfähigkeit unter dem Einfluss demographischer und bildungspolitischer Faktoren steht. Als erstes wird ein Überblick über die Entwicklung des Qualifikationsangebots und der Arbeitsproduktivität in...

This paper investigates the relationship between the size of government and economic growth in OECD countries in 1960–2000. The underlying idea is that government expenditures on public goods basically have a positive effect on growth, but this growth effect tends to decline or even reverse...