We revisit Western Europe’s record with labor-productivity convergence, and tentatively extrapolate its implications for the future path of Eastern Europe. The poorer Western European countries caught up with the richer ones through both higher rates of physical capital accumulation and...

This paper sets out to analyse the regional policy of the European Union by assessing whether the actual distribution of funds to the regions undermines the principle of territorial concentration. The empirical analysis shows that, due to either political equilibriums or inaccurate assumptions...

In this paper we propose to measure inequality of educational achievements by constructing a Gini index on educational attainments. We then use the proposed measure to analyse the relationship between inequality in incomes and educational achievements (in terms of both the average attainments...

This paper analyses optimal irreversible investment policy when profits are subject to a multiplicative geometric Brownian motion shock. The marginal product of capital is increasing initially and decreasing thereafter. In the latter range, optimal policy is familiar: capacity is added gradually...

In spite of the great U-turn that saw income inequality rise in Western countries in the 1980s, happiness inequality has fallen in countries that have experienced income growth (but not in those that did not). Modern growth has reduced the share of both the “very unhappy” and the...

Transport infrastructure has represented one of the cornerstones of development and cohesion strategies in the European Union (EU) and elsewhere in the world. However, despite the considerable funds devoted to it, its impact remains controversial. This paper revisits the question of to what...

Developing countries are vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change, yet there is disagreement about what they should do to protect themselves from antic- ipated damages. In particular, it is unclear what the optimal balance is between investments in traditional productive capital...

The global drive towards decentralization has been increasingly justified on the basis that greater transfers of resources to subnational governments are expected to deliver greater efficiency in the provision of public goods and services and greater economic growth. This article examines...

In this paper we distinguish different “qualities” of FDI to re-examine the relationship between FDI and growth. We use ‘quality’ to mean the effect of a unit of FDI on economic growth. However this is difficult to establish because it is a function of many different country and project...

The majority of the literature on fiscal decentralization has tended to stress that the greater capacity of decentralized governments to tailor policies to local preferences and to be innovative in the provision of policies and public services, the greater the potential for economic efficiency...