The goal of this paper is to offer a non-technical interpretation of the “Great Divergence” and “Great Convergence” stories. After reviewing existing explanations in the literature, I offer a different interpretation. Western countries exited the Malthusian trap by destroying traditional...

In June 2016, the European Commission issued a new EU Blue Card proposal. This proposal is meant to make the EU more attractive for highly qualified workers from third countries. While strengthening the knowledge economy of the EU, the potential impacts of the new Blue Card proposal on...

One of the main goals of this study is to assess to what extent public spending contribute to enhance economic growth and poverty reduction. For this purpose, multilevel analysis approaches are followed to capture the likely effects of some public expenditure on growth, inequality, and poverty....

This study aims to assess to what extent the institutional environment is responsible for worldwide differences in economic development. To answer this question, a new concept of the institutions-augmented Solow model is constructed. The analysis covers 153 countries and the period 1994-2009....

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...

This paper offers a concise survey on the literature of growth empirics applying to DCs. It is argued that there is a number of important stylised facts of economic growth relevant to DCs which are not included in the corresponding lists of Kaldor and Romer. In contrary to the usual procedure,...