The share of the population aged 60 and over is projected to increase in nearly every country in the world during 2005-2050. Population ageing will tend to lower both labor-force participation and savings rates, thereby raising concerns about a future slowing of economic growth. Our calculations...

We use recent immigration data from 195 countries and propose an index of population diversity based on people's birthplaces. This new index is then decomposed into a size (share of foreign born) and a variety (diversity of immigrants) component and is available for 1990 and 2000 disaggregated...

Increases in the proportion of the working age population can yield a quot;demographic dividendquot; that enhances the rate of economic growth. We estimate the parameters of an economic growth model with a cross section of countries over the period 1960 to 1980 and investigate whether the...

We explore the question of how political institutions and particularly democracy affect economic growth. Although empirical evidence of a positive effect of democracy on economic performance in the aggregate is weak, we provide evidence that democracy influences productivity growth in different...

Economists use micro-based and macro-based approaches to assess the effects of health on economic growth. The micro-based approach tends to find smaller effects than the macro-based approach, thus presenting a micro-macro puzzle regarding the economic return on health. We reconcile these two...

One commonly held view about the difference between continental European countries and other OECD economies, especially the United States, is that the heavy regulation of Europe reduces its growth. Using newly assembled data on regulation in several sectors of many OECD countries, we provide...

This paper investigates the relationship between political instability and per capita GDP growth in a sample of 113 countries for the period 1950-1982. We define ?political instability? as the propensity of a government collapse, and we estimate a model in which political instability and...

This paper successfully tests on a sample of 70 countries for the period 1960-85 the following hypotheses. Income inequality, by fueling social discontent, increases socio-political instability. The latter, by creating uncertainty in the politico-economic environment, reduces investment. As a...

For decades, economists and social thinkers have debated the influence of population change on economic growth. Three alternative positions define this debate: that population growth restricts, promotes, or is independent of economic growth. Proponents of each explanation can find evidence to...

We provide new measures of ethnic, linguistic and religious fractionalization for about 190 countries. These measures are more comprehensive than those previously used in the economics literature and we compare our new variables with those previously used. We also revisit the question of the...