Recent studies suggest that the allocation of expenditures in education matters for growth. Public education spending in many transition economies, however, is often inefficient and inequitable with education outlays misallocated across sectors. This highlights the need for an assessment of the...

The paper examines the causal relationship between FDI and economic growth by using an innovative econometric methodology to study the direction of causality between the two variables. We apply our methodology, based on the Toda-Yamamoto test for causality, to time-series data covering the...

This paper seeks to fill a gap in the literature by analyzing inflation in Poland, one of only two transition economies that have adopted a strict inflation-targeting policy.The paper also introduces a new method for selecting inflation indicators. Consistent with the earlier literature,...

Using cross-sectional time series data from a large group of African countries, we examine the effects of income, institutions and social capital—with emphasis on the latter—on literacy and life expectancy. The empirical results confirm that income has a positive contribution. We also show...

Using panel data from 39 countries, this paper examines the effects of financial deepening and openness to trade and foreign capital (FDI) on rural-urban inequality in Africa. Four estimations were performed–OLS pooled cross-section, GLS pooled cross-section, fixedeffects model and an adjusted...

We examine aid-induced Dutch Disease - after controlling for the effects of remittances and FDI flows - in the context of two North African countries, Morocco and Tunisia. We do so by performing a multivariate time series analysis of aggregated annual data over the period 1980-2009. Aid causes...

The international donor community has grave concerns about the prospects for poverty reduction in what it terms fragile states. A state is classified as fragile if its country policy and institutional assessment (CPIA) score falls below a particular threshold. Recognizing that all states are...

We examine the impact of institutional quality and social capital on aid effectiveness. We find strong evidence that social capital and institutions enhance aid effectiveness. Moreover, once we account for the role of social capital and institutions, the impact of policies tend to disappear....

Tunisia's recent growth and development performance relative to countries in its region, and relative to countries at similar levels of development in other parts of the world, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, have been notable. An analysis of Tunisia's path to development reveals that the...

We examine how institutional and policy reforms affect the relationship between entrepreneurship and growth. We perform Arellano-Bond GMM estimations on annual data (over the period 1990-2002) from a large group of developing countries and focus in particular on the interplay between policy and...