Innovations in information- and telecommunication technology render the proximity requirement between business partners obsolete and make business service outsourcing via cross-border trade more feasible. Although the (service-led) growth prospects have been widely discussed, evidence at the...

Uganda has made progress towards the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving extreme income poverty by 2015, but there have been intermittent setbacks to the advances made. The incidence of poverty increased in the period 1999/00-2002/03, before falling significantly in the period...

The informal sector (IS) plays a significant role in developing countries viz. the provision of employment, income and supplying ignored markets. However, working and employment conditions within the sector are still poor. Its expansion and changing structures have thus drawn the attention of...

The European Union growth agenda has become even more pressing because growth is needed to support public and private sector deleveraging, reduce the fragility of the banking sector, counter the falling behind of southern European countries and prove that Europe is still a worthwhile place to...

- Data from 135 countries covering five decades suggests that creditless recoveries, in which the stock of real credit does not return to the pre-crisis level for three years after the GDP trough, are not rare and are characterised by remarkable real GDP growth rates: 4.7 percent per year in...

This paper aims at analyzing the implications of individuals' consumption jealousy on the dynamic structure of a two-sector model economy. We find that status-seeking substantially influences both, the long-term properties and the adjustment behavior of the model. Depending on the status motive,...

Recent years have seen a growing literature on the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) that resorts in a large part to cointegration techniques. The EKC literature has failed to acknowledge that such regressions involve unit root nonstationary regressors and their integer powers (e.g. GDP and GDP...

El presente documento investiga la movilidad social en Bolivia y discute sus implicancias para la reducción de la pobreza y el crecimiento económico de largo plazo. Regresiones en base a información de encuestas de hogares muestran que la movilidad social es muy baja en Bolivia, inclusive con...

This paper investigates social mobility in Bolivia. It is an issue of high policy relevance as the degree of social mobility can have strong implications for both poverty reducation and long-run growth. Regressions based on household survey data show that social mobility is very low in Bolivia,...

Using various methods estimates about the size of the shadow economy in 76 developing, transition and OECD countries are presented. The average size of the shadow economy (in percent of GDP) over 1989-93 in developing countries is 39 %, in transition countries 23 % and in OECD countries 12 %. An...