We examine whether government ideology was correlated with the growth in military expenditure in Germany over the period 1951-2011. By using various measures of government ideology, the results do not show any effect. The exception is an ideology measure based on the Comparative Manifesto...

Ist Südostasien anders? Dieser Frage geht Rainer Schweickert in der Kieler Studie 306 nach. Seine Analyse der Leistungsbilanzen, ihrer Teilkomponenten und ihrer Determinanten seit Anfang der 70er Jahre sowie der krisenhaften Entwicklungen in den 90er Jahren weist nach, dass diese Vermutung in...

This paper deals with the implications of natural resources for the conduct of economic policies and the role and design of institutions in resource-rich countries. The paper briefly reviews the experience of a few resource-rich countries, highlighting the successes of those that have done well...

Similar to most other developing countries, almost all Arab countries failed to catch up economically with advanced industrial countries. This paper discusses three possible explanations of the disappointing growth performance: (i) an insufficient reformmindedness of developing country...

The paper aims to examine the role of institutions relative to economic policy and geography in explaining the differential level of development across countries over time. To that end, it attempts to construct a Development Quality Index (DQI) and an Institutional Quality Index (IQI) by using...

The paper uses nonparametric methodology to examine the role of institutions in understanding differential levels of development across countries. This technique estimates first order derivatives for every country allowing a deeper look into the impact of institutions on development. The...

We obtain time series estimates of the long run growth rates of 17 OECD countries, and test the hypothesis that these are the same across countries. We find that we cannot reject this hypothesis for the first and last three decades of the 20th century. We conclude that: (i) there are few, if...