Purpose – What caused the mid-2000s world commodity price “bubble” and the recent commodity price growth? Some have suggested that rapid global industrial growth over the past decade is the key driver of price growth. Others have argued that high commodity prices are a result of...

An importance source of finance for poorer economies, is foreign aid; this paper examines some controversies surrounding its provision. The advanced economies have provided hundreds of billions of dollars in aid to the developing world over the last several decades; although this has done much...

This paper seeks to fill a gap in the literature by analyzing inflation in Poland, one of only two transition economies that have adopted a strict inflation-targeting policy. The paper also introduces a new method for selecting inflation indicators. Consistent with the earlier literature,...

Prospects for Russia’s membership in the WTO now look better than any point since accession negotiations began almost a decade ago. Good progress with economic and legal reforms within Russia has left the country’s economy better prepared for membership. Nevertheless, the economy still...

We study whether financial openness facilitates the economic integration of formerly centrally planned economies with the EU-15. Two dimensions of economic integration are considered: cross-country convergence of per-capita incomes and bilateral trade in goods and services. We find that more...

The use of margin requirements as a potential policy tool for controlling sudden stock price changes and market volatility has attracted considerable attention in the developed stock markets. However, no consensus has emerged regarding the significance of the impact of changes in margin...

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We study the nexus between natural resources and growth in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and find that SSA is indeed special: resources dependence retards growth in SSA, but not elsewhere. The natural resources curse is thus specific to SSA. We then show that this specificity does not depend on the...

Recent studies suggest that the allocation of expenditures in education is important for growth. The state of public education spending in many transition economies highlights the need for an assessment of the nature of education expenditures in these countries. This paper attempts to fill this...

This paper examines the causal relationship between FDI and economic growth by using an innovative econometric methodology to study the direction of causality between the two variables. We apply our methodology, based on the Toda-Yamamoto test for causality, to time-series data covering the...