The authors investigate the impact on economic growth and development of long-run movements in the external terms of trade, with special reference to the experience of 18 oil-exporting countries between 1973 and 1989. They argue that this sample approximates a controlled experiment for examining...

A distinction is often made between short-term and long-term capital flows: the former are deemed unstable hot money and the latter are deemed stable cold money. Using time-series analysis of balance of payments data for five industrial and five developing countries, we find that in most cases...

Can developing countries affect the variance of real imports solely by altering the way debt service is paid? The answer, says the author, is a qualified yes. The presumption that fixed rate debt is less risky than flexible rate debt is historically inaccurate as a general proposition. Using...

This paper re-examines the evidence linking poor growth during the era of import substituting industrialization with trade restrictions. Recent work, notably Rodriguez and Rodrik (2000), asserts that all the evidence is fragile, implying that economists who believe that trade restrictions played...

GDP accounts are customarily compiled in several alternative ways, each aggregating transactions in different ways, but all (at least in theory) adding to the same total. Two of the most common aggregations are that focused on expenditures (based on the standard national income accounting...

This paper looks at the empirical record whether big infrastructure and public capital drives have succeeded in accelerating economic growth in low-income countries. It looks at big long-lasting drives in public capital spending, as these were arguably clear and exogenous policy decisions. On...