“I think that the most important question that an economist can ask is, What is it that makes a country grow? More than anything else it is economic growth that affects human welfare…this is why it must remain a major research interest for economists.†In this interview Xavier...

Estimates of democracy's effect on the public sector are obtained from comparisons of 142 countries over the years 1960-90. Based on three tenets of voting theory - that voting mutes policy preference intensity, political power is equally distributed in democracies, and the form of voting...

Some natural resourcesil and minerals in particularxert a negative and nonlinear impact on growth via their deleterious impact on institutional quality. We show this result to be very robust. The Nigerian experience provides telling confirmation of this aspect of natural resources. Waste and...

A key economic issue is whether poor countries or regions tend to grow faster than rich ones: are there automatic forces that lead to convergence over time in the levels of per capita income and product? The authors use the neoclassical growth model as a framework to study convergence across the...

We argue that the relevant monetary decision for the majority of U.S. households is not the fraction of assets to be held in interest-bearing form, but whether to hold any such assets at all (we call this "the decision to adopt" the financial technology). We show that the key variable governing...

Paul Romer’s paper Increasing Returns and Long Run Growth, now15 years old, led to a resurgence in the research on economic growth. Since then, growth literature has expanded dramatically and has shifted the research focus of many generations of macroeconomists. The new line of work has...

We estimate the world distribution of income by integrating individual income distributions for 125 countries between 1970 and 1998. We estimate poverty rates and headcounts by integrating the density function below the $1/day and $2/day poverty lines. We find that poverty rates decline...

In this paper I try to move away from the Extreme Bounds method of identifying" Instead of analyzing the" extreme bounds of the estimates of the coefficient of a particular variable distribution. My claim in this paper is that, if we do this, the picture emerging from the" empirical growth...

We survey the literatures that study the relation between the trade regime and growth and financial development, financial repression, and growth. We analyze the relation between the trade regime, the degree of financial development and the growth performance of a large cross section of...

The dismal growth performance of Africa is the worst economic tragedy of the XXth century. We document the evolution of per capita GDP for the continent as a whole and for subset of countries south of the Sahara desert. We document the worsening of various income inequality indexes and we...