This paper argues that institutional quality has both direct and indirect (moderating) effects on productivity of countries. These hypotheses are tested using a battery of institutional proxies (governance, economic freedom, intellectual property rights and ease of doing business) and two...

This paper investigates the relationship between corruption and development. By a study of the determinants of the phenomenon as well as its implications on growth, this paper address the corruption challenge faced by governments and policymakers. Based on the theoretical framework of the...

This paper throws new light on the relationship between income and democracy. Using data for 162 countries over 1960-2018, we show that the causal relationship between political and economic development is U-shaped: "intermediate" political regimes significantly lead to inferior economic...

Formal private property rights (“FPPRs”) have been advocated as an important prerequisite to economic development: a legal right to property ownership motivates economic players to engage in economic activities when these activities yield property interests, and this, in turn, contributes to...

This study investigates the impact of institutional quality on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflows using panel data for low, lower-middle, upper-middle and high-income countries for the sample period of 1996-2016 using the system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM). The empirical results...

Focusing on Low-Income Countries, we investigate the behavior of fiscal variables during and after elections. The results indicate that during election years, government consumption significantly increases and leads to higher fiscal deficits. During the two years following elections, the fiscal...

Within the fundamental determinants of cross-country income inequality, ‘humanly devised' political institutions represent a hallmark factor that societies can influence, as opposed to, for example, geography. Focusing on the portion of inequality explainable by differences in political...

Empirical analysis shows that formal and informal institutions are key factors in explaining why some countries, as well as territories within countries, are more prosperous than others are. After almost 160 years from their formal unification, Italian territories are still quite heterogeneous...

Numbers of economists of development consider that Good Governance, defined as the quality management and orientation of development policies has a positive influence on economic performance. The question is what content the literature gives to the concept of governance? According to the World...

This paper surveys the available literature on liberalisation and growth, updates the widely used Sachs and Warner (1995) index of trade liberalisation for 193 countries up to 2010, and then investigates the impacts of trade liberalisation in economic growth using a dynamic growth model for a...