This paper shows that increasing government social expenditures can make a substantive contribution to increasing household consumption in China. The paper first undertakes an empirical study of the relationship between the savings rate and social expenditures for a panel of OECD countries and...

This paper explores the impact of high public debt on long-run economic growth. The analysis, based on a panel of advanced and emerging economies over almost four decades, takes into account a broad range of determinants of growth as well as various estimation issues including reverse causality...

This paper studies sources of technological upgrading in China and India. What is striking about the impressive growth of China and (to a lesser degree) India is that they export products associated with a high productivity level that is much higher than a country at their income level....

The relationship between income distribution and economic growth has long been an important economic research subject. Despite substantial evidence on the negative impact on long-term growth of inequality in the literature, however, there is not much consensus on the specific channels through...

"Foreign direct investment (FDI) has dramatically increased worldwide and is the most important form of all private capital flows to developing countries. Yet, it is an important empirical question whether FDI affects total factor productivity (TFP) positively. We investigate the effect of FDI...

We study the cyclical behavior of fiscal policy to explain why some countries exhibit procyclical fiscal policy stances-being expansionary in good times and contractionary in bad times. We develop a model that links the polarization of preferences over fiscal spending to the procyclicality bias....

This paper presents empirical evidence on the role that policy and institutional settings in both product and labour market play for productivity and firm dynamics. It exploits a new firm-level database for ten OECD countries and industry-level data for a broader set of countries, together with...

This paper assesses the performance of the United States health system in an international context and discusses potential directions for reform. The US health system is unique among OECD countries in its heavy reliance on the private sector for both financing and delivery of health care. The...