While recent advances in communications technology have effectively reduced the physical distance that knowledge and innovations have to travel between countries, cultural differences between countries still limit the ease with which innovations are transferred and adapted. So, countries with...

This paper argues that some governments adopt growth-reducing policies due to the rational self-interest of the political elites. The model takes a rent-seeking government that can block innovation, and incorporates it into a Schumpeterian growth model. The quality of a country's institutions is...

Political competition between European countries has often been viewed as being a stimulus to the innovation process and part of the reason why Europe was the first region of the world to experience sustained growth. Countries that fell behind their rivals technologically and economically became...