Corruption, particularly political or quot;grandquot; corruption, distorts the entire decision-making process connected with public investment projects. The degree of distortions is higher with weaker auditing institutions. The evidence presented shows that higher corruption is associated with...

Do more open financial economies grow faster? The short answer is yes, as long as certain policies are in place. This paper extends previous studies by analyzing how different legal protections interact with each other and with initial wealth to allow financial openness to enhance growth. I...

How much does public capital matter for economic growth? How large should it be? This paper attempts to answer these questions, taking the case of SSA countries. It develops and estimates a model that posits a nonlinear relationship between public investment and growth, to determine the...

How much does public capital matter for economic growth? How large should it be? This paper attempts to answer these questions, taking the case of SSA countries. It develops and estimates a model that posits a nonlinear relationship between public investment and growth, to determine the...

South Africa is a developing country faced with diverse challenges like high unemployment, poverty, inequality and low economic growth. In an attempt to address these issues, government can embark on borrowing and incur public debt. Countries that run large persistent public debt signal negative...

This paper analyses the contribution of public investment to growth in southern Italy in the second half of the twentieth century (1951-1995). The period saw the only convergence in modern times of the Mezzogiorno towards the Italian average (1951-1973), followed by divergence (1974-1995). Using...

This paper addresses the issue of whether and by how much public capital can enhance economic performance. We apply different methodologies to Italian regional data for the period 1970-1994. The results are presented for Italy as a whole and for different macroregions, and for individual...

This paper presents the framework and methodology for the economic valuation of the knowledge-based economy in five Latin American (LA) countries, namely Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico, Peru and the Dominican Republic, for which a new database (IDB-Ivie, 2020) has recently been released. It...

This paper presents the framework and methodology for the economic valuation of the knowledge-based economy in five Latin American (LA) countries, namely Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico, Peru and the Dominican Republic, for which a new database (IDB-Ivie, 2020) has recently been released. It...

Pereira’s (2000) method of computing the return on public investment in a VAR is extended. A new return measure which accounts for public and private costs is proposed. An application to US data shows non-trivial differences between alternative return rates.