This paper defines economic slumps as sequences of structural breaks exhibiting a specific pattern. We identify 58 such episodes between 1950 and 2008 among 138 countries, and then examine the phases of decline and their duration. In some countries declines last extremely long, and we put...

This paper uses the detailed information in the 1995 Census of Industrial Production as a benchmark for analysing the coverage, concepts and consistency of published statistical series. On the basis of the analysis, the paper proposes a series of adjustments which result in more consistent...

This paper discusses the characteristics and determinants of entrepreneurial behaviour in Uganda. It is based on a recent survey of urban and rural entrepreneurs, executed in May 2008. The main dependent variables are business success, gestation activities and innovative performance. The paper...

To date there has been few systematic and comparative empirical analyses of the nature of economic development in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS). We contribute to addressing this gap by exploring the patterns of structural change between 1980 and 2010, focusing on the...

This paper examines the theoretical and empirical evidence for the hypothesis that manufacturing is the main engine of growth in developing countries. The paper opens with an overview of the main arguments supporting the engine of growth hypothesis and then examines each of these arguments using...

We examine the diffusion of steam technology across British counties during the eighteenth century. First, we provide new estimates for the regional variations in the timing, pace and extent of usage of steam engines. Our main data source is an updated version of the list of steam engines...

In this paper we investigate whether long run time series of income per capita are better described by a trend-stationary model with few structural changes or by unit root processes in which permanent stochastic shocks are responsible for the observed growth discontinuities. To this purpose, we...