This paper examines the country-level dynamics of long-run growth in Africa between 1975 and 2005. We are primarily interested in examining how growth has affected mobility and the distribution of income among countries. We analyse changes in the cross-country income structure and convergence....

The present work analyzes convergence issues on a sample of international countries. By using nonparametric and semiparametric techniques, evidence of club convergence is found. Multimodality and persistence is a result emerging from the study of both real data and steady-state solutions. Thus,...

The Dominican Republic and Haiti share the island of Hispaniola and are broadly similar in terms of geography and historical institutions, yet their growth performance has diverged remarkably. The countries had the same per capita real GDP in 1960 but, by 2005, the Dominican Republic's per...

This paper develops and applies a simple “conditional growth” framework to make long-term GDP projections for the world economy, taking as a starting point recent empirical evidence about the importance of total factor productivity and human capital in explaining current cross-country...

In the euro area, there is mixed evidence that the GDP per capita of lower-income economies has been catching up with that of higher-income economies since the start of monetary union. The significant real convergence performance of some of the most recent members contrasts with that of the...

This paper examines conditional convergence of OECD countries in gross domestic product (GDP) and health care expenditure (HCE) per capita. It presents estimation of the augmented Solow growth model suggested by Mankiw, Romer and Weil (1992) to explain variation in output and expenditure per...

Nighttime lights data are a measure of economic activity whose measurement error is plausibly independent of the errors of most conventional indicators. Therefore, we can use nighttime lights as an independent benchmark to assess existing measures of economic activity (Pinkovskiy and...

Nighttime lights data are a measure of economic activity whose measurement error is plausibly independent of the errors of most conventional indicators. Therefore, we can use nighttime lights as an independent benchmark to assess existing measures of economic activity (Pinkovskiy and...

In this paper we use a transparent statistical methodology - synthetic control methods - to implement data-driven comparative studies about the impact of autocratic transition on real per capita GDP. The applied methodology compares the growth of countries that experienced a transition to...