Delays and cost overruns in Public Sector investments can raise the capital-output ratio in the sector and elsewhere, bringing down the efficacy of investments. Yet there are no estimates of the delays and cost overruns, and of their opportunity cost. This study arrives at rough estimates of the...

New macro empirical evidence is provided to assess the relative importance of object and idea gaps in explaining the world income distribution dynamics over a benchmark period 1960-1985. Results are then extended through 1995. Formal statistical hypothesis tests allow us to discriminate between...

Using a comprehensive international trade data set we investigate empirical regularities (known as Zipf’s Law or the rank-size rule) for the distribution of the interaction between countries as measured by revealed comparative advantage. Using the recently developed estimator by Gabaix and...

This Working Paper assesses the impact on investment of a reduction in corporate taxes and the impact on employment, labor formality, and growth of a reduction in non-wage labor costs in Colombia. First, and following Hall and Jorgensen (1967), we estimate an investment function, which depends...

There is a debate in the literature on the appropriate methods and metrics for evaluating the economic impacts of tourism investments. Available analytical techniques include input-output modelling, computable general equilibrium modelling, cost benefit analysis, expenditure-based methods, and...

The paper starts, on one hand, from the statement unanimously accepted, that corruption exists in all societies, and on the other hand, from the preoccupations existent in the international literature about proving scientifically the models of analysis of corruption and determining on this basis...

In this paper, I argue that cultural additivity mechanism could be the means of human survival and development. My point is based on two core works. The first is “Cultural additivity: behavioural insights from the interaction of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism in folktales”. In this...

This paper analyzes the political economy of growth when agents and the government have finite horizons and equilibrium growth is inefficient. A quot;representativequot; government (that is, one whose preferences reflect those of its constituents) endowed merely with the ability to tax and...

Previous studies on regional convergence in the US have employed varied methodologies and yielded different conclusions. Some authors report evidence that convergence has grown stronger in recent decades, while others find recent years have seen an end to convergence. We test for convergence...

Income-based as well as most existing multidimensional poverty indices (MPI) assume equal distribution within the household and thus yield a biased assessment of individual poverty and poverty by age or gender. In this paper we first show that the direction of the bias depends on how these...