The paper aims to examine the role of institutions relative to economic policy and geography in explaining the differential level of development across countries over time. To that end, it attempts to construct a Development Quality Index (DQI) and an Institutional Quality Index (IQI) by using...

The paper uses nonparametric methodology to examine the role of institutions in understanding differential levels of development across countries. This technique estimates first order derivatives for every country allowing a deeper look into the impact of institutions on development. The...

The regional development policy in Brazil materializes mainly in the regional development funds for the north-east (FNE), the north (FNO), and the centre-west (FCO), in which more than EUR36 billion was invested between 2004 and 2010. This paper examines the economic effect of these regional...

In the context of wide regional disparities emerging in the process of development, the banks have an additional responsibility in India. That responsibility is to enter the under developed regions and to mobilize and channelize resources into local economic activities such that local...

Recent literatures on entrepreneurship and economic growth estimate the empirical relationships between the following pairs of variables: (1) institutions and entrepreneurial activity; (2) institutions and economic growth; and (3) entrepreneurship and economic growth.This paper revisits each of...

The commonly-used satellite images of nighttime lights fail to capture the true brightness of most cities. We show that night lights are a reliable proxy for economic activity at the city level, provided they are first corrected for top-coding. We present a stylized model of urban luminosity and...

Recognising the indispensable role of fighting corruption in the quest for, and measure of, effective institutions, this paper looks into unrecognised or neglected interrelations between corruption and other pertinent indicators that could enhance institutional performance. In particular, it...

China and Brazil are two countries with continental dimensions, with differences in availability of natural resources, population sizes, and which have adopted different strategies of economic growth in the past. China has been following consistently a strategy of Export Led Growth (ELG), while...

This article focuses on identifying what are the key sectors with high potential for drag induced investment in the Mexican economy, also characterizes the sectors according to their hierarchy, impact and degree of articulation. To achieve this the input-output matrix national 2003 was used...

In this article, we investigate the relevance of structural change in country-wide productivity growth considering within-country differences. For this purpose, we propose a two-step decomposition approach that accounts for differences among subnational units. To highlight the relevance of our...