Empirical work shows that competition is important for promoting economic growth. However, in Japan the promotion of competition has long been compromised by ministerial guidance and exemptions from the competition law. Thus, the level and growth of productivity have been low in many...

The strength of product market competition plays an important role in ensuring dynamic economic growth. This paper examines product market competition and its link with economic performance in Switzerland whose growth has been weaker than in most OECD countries since 1980. It shows that...

The goal of this paper is to apply the theory of the political Kuznets curve to Russia and reveal the key determinants of the probability of recent protests during 2011-2012 in the Russian regions. We apply the political Kuznets curve in the time and spatial dimensions, and find mixed evidence:...

This paper provides evidence on the links between financial deregulation and economic performance in a European context. Specifically, we study the relaxation of bank branching restrictions in Spain which triggered off a remarkable inter-regional expansion of savings banks which was coincidental...

The slope of the yield curve has been estimated using quarterly data on real GDP and the nominal spread is proxied by the difference in returns from the 10 year bond rate and the 90 day bill rate. The time-series analysis after unit root tests using stationary variables revealed that the yield...

The “middle-income trap” is the phenomenon of hitherto rapidly growing economies stagnating at middle-income levels and failing to graduate into the ranks of high-income countries. In this study we examine the middle-income trap as a special case of growth slowdowns, which are identified as...

This paper develops a new index which provides early warning signals of a growth crisis in the event of large external shocks in low-income countries. Multivariate regression analysis and a univariate signaling approach are used to map information from a parsimonious set of underlying policy,...

This study critically examines the relationship between the capital market and economic growth of Nigeria. Data are mainly obtained from secondary sources, the CBN statistical bulletin over the period of 1980–2015. The results from the augmented Dickey Fuller unit root test show that all the...

This paper analyses the short- and long-run effects of trade openness on financial development in a panel including data on 35 European countries over the period 2001-2019. For this purpose, it uses the PMG (pooled mean group) estimator for dynamic panels developed by Pesaran et al. (1999). The...

Sovereign debt crises have regained attention since the recent crises in several European countries. This paper focuses on a particular aspect of the debt crisis literature: the impact of sovereign default on economic growth. Previous research agrees on the negative impact, but not on size and...