We discuss political economy mechanisms which can explain the resource curse,in which an increase in the size of resource rents causes a decrease in the economy’stotal value added. We identify a number of channels through which resource rentswill alter the incentives of a political leader....

The extinction of genetic resources as a consequence of land development, especially in ‘biodiversity hot spots’like rain forests in South America or South East Asia, is becoming a serious problem - not only for local communitiesbut also for international firms in the pharmaceutical...

This paper embarks to analyse the role of exports and investment supposed to be major sources of economic growth in Asia Pacific. Therefore at first, the cointegration properties of exports, capital formation and GDP are examined in vector error correction models (VECMs)...

The British Industrial Revolution triggered a reversal in the social order whereby the landed elite was replaced by industrial capitalists rising from the middle classesas the economically dominant group. Many observers have linked this transformation to the contrast in values between a...

This study provides a unied growth theory to correctly predictthe initially negative and subsequently positive relationship between child mortalityand net reproduction observed in industrialized countries over the courseof their demographic transitions. The model captures the intricate...

This paper estimates the Balassa-Samuelson effects for 11 countries in central and eastern Europe on a disaggregated set of quarterly data covering the period from the mid-1990s to the first quarter of 2008. The Balassa-Samuelson effects are clearly present and explain around 24% of inflation...

In a neoclassical economy with endogenous capital- and labor-augmentingtechnical change the steady-state growth rate of output per worker is shown to increasein the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor. This conrms theassessment of Klump and de La Grandville (2000) that the...

We study the eect of a declining labor force on the incentives to engage in labor-savingtechnical change and ask how this eect is inuenced by institutional characteristics of the pensionscheme. When labor is scarcer it becomes more expensive and innovation investments that increaselabor...

This article investigates economic performance when enforceable propertyrights are missing and basic needs matter for consumption. It suggests anew view of the so-called voracity eect according to which windfall gains inproductivity induce behavior that leads to lower economic growth. Takinginto...

We find a U-shaped relation between happiness and religiosity in cross-country panel dataafter controlling for income levels. At a given level of income, the same level of happinesscan be reached with high and low levels of religiosity, but not with intermediate levels. A risein income causes an...