Soviet growth for 1960-89 was the worst in the world, after controlling for investment and human capital. And relative performance worsens over time. The authors explain the declining Soviet growth rate from 1950 to 1987 by the declining marginal product of capital. The rate of total factor...

Post-conflict countries receive substantial aid flows after the start of peace. While post-conflict countries'capacity to absorb aid (that is, the quality of their policies and institutions) is built up only gradually after the onset of peace, the evidence suggests that aid tends to peak...

Recent empirical studies question conventional wisdom about the importance of education to growth. These results partly reflect how international differences in the quality of education systems--defined by the systems'ability to produce one marginal unit of productive human capital--are not...

This paper examines the link between sectoral concentration and overall performance in the search for on-the-frontier innovations, inside-the-frontier innovations, and export booms. It extends the literature by increasing country coverage and the types of search processes considered, and by...

Using data on 49 countries from 1976 to 1993, the authors investigate whether measures of stock market liquidity, size, volatility, and integration in world capital markets predict future rates of economic growth, capital accumulation, productivity improvements, and private savings. They find...

Banking sector openness may directly affect growth by improving the access to financial services and indirectly by improving the efficiency of financial intermediaries, both of which reduce the cost of financing, and in turn, stimulate capital accumulation and economic growth. The objective of...

The authors use existing measures of the financial system - and construct many new measures - to document the relationship between the financial system and long-run growth in a cross-section of countries between 1960 and 1989. They consider various measures of the size of the financial system,...

The authors study the sources and pattern of China's impressive economic growth over the past 25 years and show that key issues currently of concern to policymakers-widening inequality, rural poverty, and resource intensity-are to a large extent rooted in China's growth strategy, and resolving...

Inequality is often regarded as a necessary evil that has to be tolerated to allow growth, says the author. The view that inequality is necessary for the accumulation of wealth, and contains the seeds of eventual increases in everyone's income, is evident in trickle down economic theories, where...

The authors consider two alternative methods of forecasting real per capita GDP at various horizons: 1) univariate time series models estimated country by country; and 2) cross-country growth regressions. They evaluate the out-of-sample forecasting performance of both approaches for a large...