Can green growth policies help protect the environment while keeping the industry growing and infrastructure expanding? This study applies Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) method on the 50-years' time series data, from 1967 to 2015, of Kitakyushu City, Japan, and found mixed evidence for...

The author identifies sources of volatility in Argentina that include weak international financial links, a recurrent credit crunch and financial underdevelopment problem, a fragile fiscal situation, and a pervasive profit and collateral squeeze mechanism brought about by a rigid labor market...

In this paper, we estimate deseasonalized monthly series for Swiss gross domestic product at constant prices of 1990 for the period 1980-1998. They are consistent with the quarterly figures estimated by the Federal Office for Economic Development and Labour and are obtained by including...

The positive association between the service sector share of output and per capita income is one of the best-known regularities in all of growth and development economics. Yet there is less than complete agreement on the nature of that association. Here we identify two waves of service sector...

The Philippines, a country of great promise in the 1950s, has greatly lagged behind many other Asian countries. Between 1991 and 1994 urban poverty declined from 26% to 29%; but rural poverty virtually stagnated at a much higher rate: 55% and 54%, respectively. Poverty lending programs were...

Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world, with 70% of its population below the poverty line. Subsidized national poverty lending programs have failed to attain viability, mobilize savings and reach the poor in significant numbers. Informal institutions such as the ubiquitous dhikuti...

Swedish elementary school children stopped receiving written end of year report cards following a grading reform in 1982. Gradual implementation of the reform creates an opportunity to investigate the effects of being graded on adult educational attainments and earnings for children in the...

The official intention of the UNESCO World Heritage List is to protect the global heritage. However, the existing List is highly imbalanced according to countries and continents. Historical reasons, such as historical GDP, population, and number of years of high civilization, have a significant...

The standard loss function gives the same weight to positive and negative deviations from the output and inflation targets. This short note criticizes this symmetry assumption. If the period covered is long enough output growth in excess of the target, and often also inflation rates that are...

Sweden has obligatory sickness and disability insurance which is both financed (from payroll taxes) and administrated by the government. In order to receive sickness benefits, insured individuals must have certificates issued by a medical doctor. Since health care is administrated at the county...