The article provides a broad-based overview on competing development strategies and the economic performance of developing countries, mainly since the year 2000. Four traditional mainstream development strategies are discussed (Washington Consensus, neo-liberalism, "good governance" and MDGs)...

The transitional economies of the Former Soviet Union (FSU) have enjoyed an extraordinary period of growth and poverty reduction between 2000 and 2007 and this occurred in concomitance with significant increases in private and public transfers to households. The paper assesses the relative...

The economic returns to education in transition countries have been extensively evaluated in the literature. The present study contributes to this literature by estimating the returns to education in Georgia during the last transition period 2000-04. We find very low returns to education in...

The aim of this paper is to examine the evolution of recruitment of elites and to investigate the nature of the links between recruitment and training of elites and economic development. We show that there was a key shift at the turn of the nineteenth century in the way the Western world trained...

What became the post-War era’s “less developed countries” (LDCs) varied enormously in their pre- modern or pre-industrial economic conditions. We hypothesize that if these countries are arrayed on a continuum of pre-industrial development such as that of the demographer Ester Boserup,...

Several recent papers suggest that the negative association between natural resource intensity and economic growth can be reversed if institutional quality is high enough. We try to understand this result in more detail by decomposing the resource measure, using alternative measures of both...

This paper identifies factors associated with takeoff - a sustained period of high growth following a period of stagnation. We examine a panel of 241 stagnation episodes" from 146 countries, 54 % of these episodes are followed by takeoffs. Countries that experience takeoffs average 2.3% annual...

The authors construct a dynamic general equilibrium model of cities and use it to estimate the effect of local agglomeration on per capita consumption growth. Agglomeration affects growth through the density of economic activity: higher production per unit of land raises local productivity....

This paper examines the relationship between stock market development and economic growth in case of Argentina's economy. Apply Granger causality and exogeneity tests based on VEC (vector error correction) models with monthly data covering the period 1993:1-2010:8. The results show that the...

I show how the influences of unskilled immigration, differential fertility between immigrants and the local indigenous population, and incentives for investment in human capital combine to predict the decline of the West. In particular, indigenous low-skilled workers lose from unskilled...