This paper revisits the question of why more open countries tend to have bigger governments. We replicate successfully the main results of Ram (2009), who rejects the role of country size as an omitted variable. However, several extensions advise against a hasty conclusion: The results differ...

This paper surveys existing measures of economic openness understood as the degree to which non-domestic actors can or do participate in a domestic economy. We introduce a typology of openness indicators, which distinguishes between 'real' and 'financial' openness as well as between 'de facto'...

This paper surveys existing measures of economic openness understood as the degree to which non-domestic actors can or do participate in a domestic economy. We introduce a typology of openness indicators, which distinguishes between "real" and "financial" openness as well as between "de facto"...

Purpose This paper empirically investigates whether trade openness (TO) in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) countries affects how banks might employ loan loss provisions (LLPs) to smooth out their earnings and how adopting the International Financial Reporting Standards...

A panel data approach is used to investigate both the steady-state and the transitional impact of trade liberalisation on export performance within a sample of selected OECD countries. The results find trade policy to be a largely insignificant determinant of export performance. Domestic...

This article examines the effect of openness on financial development pertaining to the Rajan and Zingales (2003) hypothesis, namely that simultaneous openness of trade and capital flows has a positive influence on financial development.They hypothesise that when a country's borders are open to...

Is government size the desirable response to macroeconomic risk, or it is the consequence of distorted political incentives with adverse effects on macroeconomic volatility? This paper reconsiders the mutual interdependence between government size and growth volatility in a large sample of...