A growing body of recent macroeconomic evidence suggests that volatility is detrimental to economic growth. The channels through which volatility affects growth, however, are less clear; substantive evidence based on disaggregate data is almost non-existent. This paper offers a framework in...

The role of foreign direct investment (FDI) in small island developing states (SIDS) is an issue that has been neglected until relatively recently. The reasons for this lack of interest are unsurprising, given both the low absolute volume of capital flows involved and the general neglect of...

This paper studies the remittances' effect on economic growth. Using panel data techniques, the authors estimate several specifications to provide support of such relationship for MENA countries over the period 19802009. The findings provide new robust evidence on how remittances are used in...

Over the last two decades EU countries experienced diverging productivity growthdevelopments. By examining the sources of EU countries growth drivers on the sectorallevel, the paper takes a new look on the influence of innovations. While standard neoclassicalNon-ICT capital deepening turns out...

Since its first inception in the debate on the relationship between environment and growth in 1992, the Environmental Kuznets Curve has been subject to continuous and intense scrutiny. The literature can be roughly divided in two historical phases. Initially, after the seminal contributions,...

The paper aims to examine the role of institutions relative to economic policy and geography in explaining the differential level of development across countries over time. To that end, it attempts to construct a Development Quality Index (DQI) and an Institutional Quality Index (IQI) by using...

In a recent paper, Colombier (2009) uses a robust estimation technique and claims to find empirical evidence that government size has not been detrimental to growth for OECD countries during the 1970 to 2001 period, and that endogenous growth theory is not corroborated. We examine the robustness...