Does trade improve institutions and contribute to long run growth? I develop a theory of trade, in which trade liberalization provides incentive to change institutions in two ways. On the one hand, trade leads to specialization according to comparative advantage, expanding the industries that do...

Acknowledging the fact that the growth experience of countries is seldom well described by the average growth rate, this paper aims at identifying countries that are similar in terms of their growth process, thus emphasizing the dynamics of growth rates. To that end, the growth experience of...

Most of the literature that explored the relationship between financial development and economic growth taking into consideration the roles played by institutional quality in the ECOWAS region still debates on the roles of institutional quality on economic growth. This study used data from...

The article provides a broad-based overview on competing development strategies and the economic performance of developing countries, mainly since the year 2000. Four traditional mainstream development strategies are discussed (Washington Consensus, neo-liberalism, "good governance" and MDGs)...

This research explores the effects of culture on technological diffusion and economic development. It shows that culture's direct effects on development and barrier effects to technological diffusion are, in general, observationally equivalent. In particular, using a large set of measures of...

A large body of evidence suggests that poor countries tend to invest less (have lower PPP - adjusted investment rates) and to face higher relative prices of investment goods. It has been suggested that this happens either because these countries have lower TFP in the investment - good producing...

Recent cross-section studies have demonstrated a strong link between measures of corruption, bureaucratic quality, property rights, and other institutional variables, and economic growth. In this paper we build on previous research and present some empirical evidence on the direction of...

While the importance of institutions for explaining cross-country income differences is widely recognized, comparatively little is known about the origins of economic institutions. One strand of the literature emphasizes cultural differences while another points at exogenous environmental...

This paper discusses the recent literature on the role of the state in economic development. It concludes that government incentives to enact sound policies are key to economic success. It also discusses the evidence on what happens after episodes of economic and political liberalizations,...

In this article we re-examine the relationship between remittances and economic growth placing special attention to the non-linearity of this relationship. Previous studies have ignored the non-linearity of the relationship between remittances and economic growth or have used a quadratic term to...