This paper develops a long run growth model for a major oil exporting economy and derives conditions under which oil revenues are likely to have a lasting impact. This approach contrasts with the standard literature on the "Dutch disease" and the "resource curse", which primarily focus on short...

This paper examines the economic transformation of Iran in a global context through the twentieth century. At the start of that century, the Iranian economy had long remained stagnant, poor, and largely agrarian, with a marginal role in the world economy. By the turn of 21st century, Iran had...

The paper suggests that institutional developments may not have monotone effects on economic policy. The paper develops a model and offers evidence from fuel pricing across countries to show that improvements in the rule of law and democracy may initially enable the public to increase its share...

This paper develops a model of government policy toward industrial control and regulation that sheds light on the determinants of differential country experiences in terms of organizational arrangement and enterprise performance. In contrast to the model developed by Shleifer and Vishny (1994...

There is a great deal of variation in the extent of state ownership of enterprises across countries and despite the growing consensus over the benefits of privatization many countries continue to maintain large public sectors. Currently, there are two prominent theories that purport to explain...

This paper examines the determinants of hidden public debt that is, government financial commitments and contingent liabilities that do not receive official recognition and explicit budgetary allocations, but are later on assumed by the government as additional debt outside the normal budget....

This paper develops a theoretical model of direct foreign investment to analyze the changing role of regulatory policies in developing countries in the presence of globalization. The main result is that deregulation is an optimal response to globalization, at least in countries that face a FDI...

This paper studies the interaction of political institutions, government policies, and the economic performance in a developing country. The focus is on Turkey's economic history and the 'paradox of Turkish liberalism'. Except during the periods of war and post-war recovery, the fastest...

This paper reviews some of the main trends in the Iranian economy over the past two decades and discusses the key economic policy issues that divide the reformist from the more conservative factions in Iran. It argues that the economic policy dilemma of whether to liberalize the economy has not...

The paper considers international per capita output and its growth using a panel of data for 102 countries between 1960-1989. It sets out an explicitly stochastic Solow growth model and shows that this has quite different properties from the standard approach where the output equation is...