Do countries with lower policy-induced barriers to international trade grow faster, once other relevant country characteristics are controlled for? There exists a large empirical literature providing an affirmative answer to this question. We argue that methodological problems with the empirical...

In September 1997, at its Hong Kong meeting, the Interim Committee of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) adopted a statement on the liberalization of international capital movements. It asked the executive boeard of the Fund to complete work on an amendment to the IMF's Articles of Agreement...

Basic economic theory identifies a number of efficiency gains that derive from international capital mobility. But just as with free trade in goods, there is no guarantee that capital mobility makes everyone better o¤. Consequently, capital mobility may be politically unsustainable even though...

South Africa has undergone a remarkable transformation since its democratic transition in 1994, but economic growth and employment generation have been disappointing. Most worryingly, unemployment is currently among the highest in the world. While the proximate cause of high unemployment is that...

This is an attempt to derive broad, strategic lessons from the diverse experience with economic growth in last fifty years. The paper revolves around two key arguments. One is that neoclassical economic analysis is a lot more flexible than its practitioners in the policy domain have generally...

The contemporary approach to political economy is built around vested interests - elites, lobbies, and rent-seeking groups which get their way at the expense of the general public. The role of ideas in shaping those interests is typically ignored or downplayed. Yet each of the three components...