Are the well-known facts about urbanization in the United States also true for the developing world? We compare American metropolitan areas with comparable geographic units in Brazil, China and India. Both Gibrat's Law and Zipf's Law seem to hold as well in Brazil as in the U.S., but China and...

Conventional wisdom has it that the return to capital equals the marginal product of capital. Consequently, an equal return to capital across countries is interpreted as evidence that the marginal product of capital is the same across countries. This paper shows that if a firm's elasticity of...

This paper attempts to study factors that could be considered as a good environment for tax compliance of the selected groups of countries for under developed, developing and developed countries. Selected factors used in our study are deemed to be factors that could enhance the confidence of...

The paper investigates the impact of country size on aggregate national efficiency, using a nonparametric programming methodology to measure output distance functions and relative national efficiency for a group of 85 developing countries over the period 1980-89. Tobit regression models are...

Economic Indicators alone cannot capture the totality of ‘Quality of Life’ (QOL). The Most acceptable Measure of QOL is the ‘Human Development Index’ (HDI) of UNDP. HDI is a composite Index of three Indicators of three essential dimensions of life. These three indicators are of per...

This paper provides a theoretical analysis of product and process patent regimes in the context of North-South trade. For some parametric configurations, we show that Northern government would favor the product patent regime in the South, although the Northern firm would prefer the process...

Evidence is presented on the Real Interest Parity Hypothesis for a set of emerging and developed countries. This is done by carrying out a set of unit-root tests on the real interest differentials with respect to Germany and the US. Our results support the hypothesis of a rapid reversion towards...

Over the last two decades, unconditional cash transfers have become an increasingly widespread tool to address poverty in low- and middle-income countries. In the same period, however, cash transfer programs remained virtually non-existent in high-income countries, due in part to the benefits...

Family is an important institution to a society for its effective functioning; hence factors affecting family formation decisions are important within the context of the Second Demographic Transition (SDT). This research focuses on two main changes which have occurred over the past decades;...