Is tourism an opportunity for lagging countries in the elusive quest for growth (Easterly, 2002)? Recent empirical evidence suggests that the answer is a cautious yes. Aggregate cross-country data show that tourism specialization is likely to be associated with higher per capita GDP growth rates...

During the last few years, the newly coined term middle-income trap has been widely used by policymakers to refer to the middle-income economies that seem to be stuck in the middle-income range. However, there is no accepted definition of the term in the literature. In this paper, we study...

This paper discusses the recent literature on the role of the state in economic development. It concludes that government incentives to enact sound policies are key to economic success. It also discusses the evidence on what happens after episodes of economic and political liberalizations,...

Interest in biofuels is growing worldwide as concerns about the security of energy supply and climate change are moving into the focus of policy makers. With the exception of bioethanol from Brazil, however, production costs of biofuels are typically much higher than those of fossil fuels.As a...

This paper discusses the difficulties associated with measuring entrepreneurship in developing countries. Three important dichotomies in the research on entrepreneurship are discussed: formal-informal, legal-illegal, and necessity-opportunity. Several common measures of entrepreneurship are...

This paper studies the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis in two areas with strong differences in economic development, sixteen OECD countries and sixteen Latin American economies. Applying panel cointegration and bootstrapping techniques that solve for cross-sectional dependence problems in the data,...

This paper studies the Balassa-Samuelson effects in two areas with strong differences in economic development, sixteen OECD countries and sixteen Latin American economies. The USA is taken as a benchmark. Applying recent panel cointegration and bootstrapping techniques that solve for...

Using data from developing countries, this paper explores the nature and direction of the links between ICT diffusion and per capita income, trade and financial indicators, education, and freedom indicators. Internet hosts, Internet users, personal computers and mobile phones represent...