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...

Paper reviews India's growth performance since independence. Phrases suchas "Hindu Rate of Growth," sometimes make a telling comment and expose obscureeconomic data to a wider audience, but they can just as readily obscure reality byfocussing attention on the wrong issue. There is nothing in the...

In this paper we look at the economic development of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in the context of structural transformation. We use Hidalgo et al.'s (2007) concept of product space to show the evolution of the region's productive structure, and discuss the opportunities for growth and...

China's rapid growth and success in poverty reduction over the last three decades has inspired world-wide admiration. This paper uses a simple framework with a Kaleckian flavor to analyze structural developments in the Chinese economy, and to understand some of the distributional consequences....

We obtain time series estimates of the long run growth rates of 17 OECD countries, and test the hypothesis that these are the same across countries. We find that we cannot reject this hypothesis for the first and last three decades of the 20th century. We conclude that: (i) there are few, if...

This study attempts to measure the inefficiency associated with aggregate investment in a transitional economy. The inefficiency is decomposed into allocative and production inefficiency based on standard production theory. Allocative inefficiency is measured by disequilibrium investment demand....

This paper explores the institutional determinants of economic growth in Latin America by taking advantage of recent empirical research that employs subjective and objective measures to test for a possible Northian explanation that links institutional quality and economic growth. I provide a...

The debate over whether political democracy is the least bad regime, as Churchill once said, remains unresolved because history has been ignored or misread, and because recent statistical studies have not chosen the right tests. Using too little historical information, and mistaking formal...

Recent studies on the growth effects of exchange rate regimes offer a wide range of different, sometimes contradictory results. In this paper, we systematically compare three prominent contributions in this field. Using a common data set, a common specification, and common estimation methods, we...

This paper analyses macroeconomic aspects of exit from aid-dependence. By 'exit from aid', we mean substantial and enduring decline over time in Official Development Assistance (ODA) as a share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The relevant macroeconomic variables are identified by systematically...