The cost of public investment is not the value of public capital. Unlike for private investors, there is no remotely plausible behavioral model of the government as investor that suggests that every dollar the public sector spends as"investment"creates capital in an economic sense. This...

The author presents theory and calculations to show that part of the explanation of slow growth in many poor countries is not that governments did not spend on investment, but that these investments did not create productive capital. For a variety of reasons governments take resources from...

This paper has an empirical and overtly methodological goal. The authors propose and defend a method for estimating the effect of household economic status on educational outcomes without direct survey information on income or expenditures. They construct an index based on indicators of...

Recently, much attention has been paid in the literature on economic growth to the phenomenon of"conditional convergence,"the tendencies of economies with lower-level incomes to grow faster, conditional on their rate of factor accumulation. The author documents that, regardless of conditional...

Cross-national data on economic growth rates show that increases in educational capital resulting from improvements in the educational attainment of the labor force have had no positive impact on the growth rate of output per worker. In fact, contends the author, the estimated impact of growth...

As a less restrictive trade regime is associated with greater responsiveness to economic incentives, econometric evidence that does not allow for the impact of import controls cannot be used reliably to assess the effect of a devaluation on the trade balance. Indeed, devaluation combined with...

Trade among sub-Saharan African countries is very limited. This fact, plus other political and economic considerations, has been used to motivate a growing number of regional integration schemes. Although many authors have shown that intra-sub-Saharan African trade is limited, none has yet asked...

The pressure for trade reform as an integral component of adjustment programs has intensified the ongoing debate about the benefits of trade liberalization of trade regimes in the less developed countries (LDCs). This heightened interest has in turn generated continued empirical study of the...

The ad valorem tariff rateson specific products and the ratio of tariff revenue to import value, the collected rate, are only tenuously related, contend the authors. Using tariff and revenue data (at the tariff code line level of detail) for three developing countries, the authors compare the...

This paper concentrates on geographic direction of trade only. It applies a fairly conventional gravity model technique to answer the question: What would be the geographic pattern of trade of East and Central Europe (ECE) if their trade were determined by the same factors as those that affect...