Although cross section relationships are often taken to indicate causation, and especially the important impact of economic growth on many social phenomena, they may, in fact, merely reflect historical experience, that is, similar leader-follower country patterns for variables that are causally...

We set up a three-period overlapping generation model in which young individuals allocate their time to schooling and work, healthy middle aged individuals allocate their time to leisure and work and their income to consumption and savings for retirement, and old age individuals live off their...

This paper examines the relationship between economic growth and the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) sector for a panel of 503 Brazilian micro-regions for the period 1980-2004 using panel spatial econometrics. It investigates the importance of the SME sector size measured by the share of the...

Determinants of economic growth in Ghana are analysed using restricted vector autoregressive (VAR) model for the period 1975-2013. The empirical results reveal that GDP per capita in long-run is driven by export, oil and mineral rents while government consumption retard economic growth....

We examine the effect of generalized trust on long-term economic growth. Unlike in previous studies, we use Bayesian model averaging to deal rigorously with model uncertainty and attendant omitted variable bias. In addition, we address endogeneity and assess whether the effect of trust on growth...

We examine the effect of research and development (R&D) on long-term economic growth using the Bayesian model averaging (BMA) to deal rigorously with model uncertainty. Previous empirical studies investigated the effect of dozens of regressors on long-term growth, but they did not examine the...

This paper revisits the two-equation model of Carree, van Stel, Thurik and Wennekers (2002) where deviations from the ‘equilibrium’ rate of business ownership play a central role determining both the growth of business ownership and that of economic development. Two extensions of the...

In medieval times, most people identifi ed with religious values and aggregate income and productivity grew at glacier speed. In the 20th century, religion played a much lesser role in daily life and income and productivity grew at high and unprecedented rates. The present paper develops a...

Despite recent improvements in economic performance, undernutrition rates in Africa appear to have improved much less and rather inconsistently across the continent. We examine to what extent there is an empirical linkage between income growth and reductions of child undernutrition in Africa. We...

We present a multi-country theory of economic growth in which countries are connected by a network of mutual knowledge exchange. Growth is generated through human capital accumulation and knowledge externalities. The available knowledge in any country depends on its connections to the rest of...