We assess empirically the role of the World Bank’s Country Policy so-called fiscal policy rating variables (fiscal rating, debt rating and revenue rating) on economic growth in the 46 Least Developed Countries (LDCs) in the world, during the period 1990-2022. We also investigate the role of...

In a recent article, Nowak-Lehmann, Dreher, Herzer, Klasen, and Martínez-Zarzoso (2012) (henceforth NDHKM) conclude that foreign aid has not had a significant effect on income, based on evidence from panel data potentially covering 131 countries over the period 1960-2006. The present study...

Vote-buying is widely used by parties in developing countries to influence the outcome of elections. We examine the impact of vote-buying on growth. We consider a model with a poverty trap where redistribution can promote growth. We show that vote-buying contributes to the persistence of poverty...

This study puts forward a model of a multisector economy and embeds it in a novel theoretical framework to address the relationship between commodity revenues and manufacturing output with a special focus on the role of the agricultural sector. The three-sector model lays the groundwork for...

The foreign aid landscape has undergone a paradigm shift in the last few decades, with changes in the behaviour of 'traditional' donors and a new focus on selectivity in aid disbursement, as well as 'new' donors and South-South co-operation playing an increasingly important role. Amidst these...

This paper contributes to the empirical literature by investigating the impact of private capital inflows on economic growth across former Soviet-bloc countries between 1990 and 2015. Roles of the stock market and of demand-side macroeconomic policy are investigated using panel data analysis....

This paper explores the two-way relationships between Economic Growth (EG) and Human Development (HD), building on an earlier work by Ranis, Stewart, and Ramirez (2000). Here, we show that HD is not only a product of EG but also an important input to it. The paper develops new empirical...

This paper uses panel data for 116 countries over the period 1995-2016 to investigate the heterogeneity of the debt-growth nexus across countries and the factors underlying it. In the first step, the grouped fixed effects (GFE) estimator proposed by Bonhomme and Manresa (2015) is used to...