Do political regime and freedom have a significant effect on economic growth? This paper tries to maintain differences in three political regimes viz. autocracies, bureaucracies and democracies and examines whether these regimes have different features overall and within specific continents in...

Walter Korpi argues in a previous issue of Challenge (March/April 2000) that Swedish economists' claim that Sweden's growth performance has been inferior to that of other industrialized countries is at odds with the facts. Since Sweden has not grown slowly relative to other countries, there is...

Is tourism an opportunity for lagging countries in the elusive quest for growth (Easterly, 2002)? Recent empirical evidence suggests that the answer is a cautious yes. Aggregate cross-country data show that tourism specialization is likely to be associated with higher per capita GDP growth rates...

This paper investigates the robustness of determinants of economic growth in the presence of model uncertainty, parameter heterogeneity and outliers. The robust model averaging approach introduced in the paper uses a flexible and parsimonious mixture modeling that allows for fat-tailed errors...

In his 1966 Inaugural Lecture at Cambridge, entitled On the Causes of the Slow Rate of Economic Growth in the UK, the Hungarian-born British economist, Nicholas Kaldor presented a series of "laws" to account for the growth rate differences between Britain on the one hand, and the more successful...

Defense literature is still in need of a theoretical framework in the neoclassical sense, in regard to empirical research on the relationship between defense spending and economic growth. In this respect, Dunne, Smith and Willenbockel (2005), although not without technical problems, represented...

Mankiw Romer and Weil (1992) made the Solovian set up widely-used to test the determinants of economic growth and the speed of convergence. Subsequently, in almost all convergence studies, an exogenously growing technology is assumed and this component is treated as part of the constant term. In...

This work studies the role of gender on economic convergence in a standard convergence model expanded by gender shares of labor force. The theoretical part of the paper shows the positive role of gender on economic growth. Next, the paper presents 5-year span panel data tests of the contribution...

Walter Korpi argues in a previous issue of Challenge (March/April 2000) that Swedish economists' claim that Sweden's growth performance has been inferior to that of other industrialized countries is at odds with the facts. Since Sweden has not grown slowly relative to other countries, there is...