Africa's economic history since 1960 fits the classical definition of tragedy: potential unfulfilled with disastrous consequences. The authors use one mehthodology - cross-country regressions - to account for sub-Saharan Africa's growth performance over the past 30 years and to suggest policies...

This paper shows how stock markets can accelerate growth and how policy can affect that growth either directly (by altering investment incentives) or indirectly (by changing the incentives underlying the creation of financial contracts). To help explain the role of financial markets in economic...

The authors suggest that there are important opportunities to empirically evaluate the theoretically predicted channels from policy to growth. They propose a research agenda based on the endogenous growth literature, designed to address the questions: How do national policies affect long-run...

The authors evaluate whether the level of development in the banking sector exerts a causal impact on economic growth and its sources-total factor productivity growth, physical capital accumulation, and private saving. They use (1) a pure cross-country instrumental variable estimator to extract...

Few economic ideas are as intuitive as the notion that increasing investment is the best way to raise future output. This idea was the basis for the theory"capital fundamentalism."Under this view, differences in national stocks of capital were the primary determinants of differences in levels of...

Joseph Schumpeter argued in 1911 that the services provided by financial intermediaries - mobilizing savings, evaluating projects, managing risk, monitoring managers, and facilitating transactions -stimulate technological innovation and economic development. The authors present evidence that...