This paper aims to examine the influence of national institutions on start-up firms’ initial growth and internationalization. Focusing on two entrepreneurial start-ups in the ICT sector, this study highlights Japanese institutions in transition, and depicts the way in which rapidly growing...

On March, 2011 the signing of the Treaty of Assunción by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay celebrated its 20th anniversary. Preferential trade agreements that create joint economic spaces might be seen as useful tools to promote economic development. This article discusses to what extent...

Using newly comprehensive data and tools from the Global Consumption and Income Project or CGIP, covering most of the world and five decades, we present a portrait of the changing global distribution of consumption and income and discuss its implications for our understanding of inequality,...

Eric Jones has found that excessive taxes were detrimental for pre-modern China's economic growth whereas moderate taxes were conducive for Europe's economic growth. This paper provides a political-economic answer to the question why these two tax systems came about. Taxation is only feasible...

On March, 2011 the signing of the Treaty of Assunción by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay celebrated its 20th anniversary. Preferential trade agreements that create "joint economic spaces" might be seen as useful tools to promote economic development. This article discusses to what...

This paper cuts adrift the mainstream approach to the legal-origins debate on the law-growth nexus by integrating both overall economic and human components in our understanding of how regulation quality and the rule of law lie at the heart of economic and inequality adjusted human developments....

Ratings of institutional quality are widely known and used in academic literature. Among such ratings are some whose compilation procedure took decades to perfect. Dozens of assessments have been accumulated, pertaining to a large and growing list of countries. These ratings use expert...

This paper empirically analyzes the net effect of trade openness on ‘economic culture,' measured by indicators of trust, respect, level of self-determination, and obedience. Openness to international trade means that societies are more likely to be exposed to alternative attitudes, beliefs,...

We challenge the “OECD view” (Arnold et al. 2011) according to which a shift from direct to indirect taxation is associated with higher long-run economic growth. We study the relationships between per capita GDP, overall tax revenue and tax composition (in particular direct vs. indirect...

Students around the world are going to school but are not learning – an emerging gap in human capital formation. To understand this gap, this paper introduces a new data set measuring learning in 164 countries and territories. The data cover 98 percent of the world's population from 2000 to...