The paper examines the export-led growth (ELG) hypothesis for nine Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries in three-variable vector autoregressive and error correction models. When considering total exports, our results reject the ELG hypothesis in almost all of these countries. When we...

Some major trends in world income inequalities and relevant economic trends are reviewed here. In recent decades, there have been indications of a reversal of the growing income divergence between North and South after over half a millennium, especially in the last two centuries. Meanwhile,...

Uzbekistan is not usually considered an economic success story, but in fact it is: its GDP increased since 1989 more than in any other post-communist country, except for China, Vietnam and Turkmenistan. The success of Uzbekistan is very much similar to the Chinese – gradual economic reforms...

Utopian socialists believed that socialism is inevitable because it is a more rational system to organize production and life, a system more in line with the “good” nature of human beings. Marxism rejected this reasoning replacing it with what is known as historical materialism: social...

According to a narrow definition, institutional capacity of the state is the ability of the government to enforce laws and regulations. There are a lot of subjective indices (control over corruption, rule of law, government effectiveness, etc.) that are designed to measure the state...

While developing countries as a group did better than developed countries in 2008-09 recession, transition economies – former communist countries – experienced the largest reduction of output. Out of 42 countries that experienced negative growth in 2007-09, 13 were transition economies. In...

In our previous papers (Polterovich V., Popov V., 2007; Polterovich V., Popov V., Tonis A., 2006) it was shown that democratization (increase in the political rights index of the Freedom house in 1970-2000) can negatively affect economic growth, if the quality of institutions at the beginning of the...

Why even after the dramatic increase in inequality in the 1990s and after the emergence and enrichment of “oligarchs”, the alternative (leftist, social democratic) economic policies that could have improved material and social wellbeing of the majority of the population is not supported by...

Uzbekistan in recent 10 years is an extremely successful economy – high growth (8%), low domestic and international debt, undervalued exchange rate, relatively even distribution of income, creation from scratch competitive export oriented auto industry. It is important though to avoid...

Why even after the dramatic increase in inequality in the 1990s and after the emergence and enrichment of “oligarchs”, the alternative (leftist, social democratic) economic policies that could have improved material and social wellbeing of the majority of the population is not supported by...