A number of cross-country comparisons do not find a robust negative relationship between government size and economic growth. In part this may reflect the prediction in economic theory that a negative relationship should exist primarily for rich countries with large public sectors. In this paper...

The search for growth-promoting policies is found to demand knowledge of how growth depends upon actions of entrepreneurs and how these actions depend upon the prevailing institutions. While institutions have extensively been examined for their influences upon the freedoms and the incentives of...

Liberal economic precepts have long been a foundation for the social science of poverty and continue to profoundly influence public policy. Liberal economics contends that poverty is dependent on the harmonious progress of economic growth, free market capitalism, worker productivity, and the...

This study examines empirically the impact of income polarization on economic growth in an unbalanced panel of more than 70 countries during the 1960-2005 period. We calculate various polarization indices using existing micro-level datasets, as well as datasets reconstructed from grouped data on...

In this paper education simultaneously affects growth and income inequality. More education does not necessarily decrease inequality when the latter is assessed by the Lorenz dominance criterion. Increases in education first increase and then decrease growth as well as income inequality, when...

Whenever a country experiences an increase in its mean income, inequality roars its ugly head and the net outcome in terms of poverty remains ambiguous. Kakwani (2000) proposes an instrument that allows quantifying this inequality-growth tradeoff. This paper applies that methodology to 28...

This paper provides an overview of poverty in North America. In it we look at the three countries of North America, Mexico, the US, and to a lesser extent Canada and attempt to both describe poverty as it exists in the three countries and explore some of the correlates of poverty. In doing so,...

For a long time conventional wisdom held that income inequality enhances investment and work incentives and thereby is good for economic growth. In the 1990s this view was turned on its head, as a number of empirical analyses found an association between inequality and slower growth across large...

This paper summarizes the economic context of immigration in Luxembourg before examining the determinants of individual and cross-national unemployment, income, and occupational mobility. It finds that although being an immigrant in itself does not seem to cause substantial economic advantage or...

This paper investigates the importance of the shape of the income distribution as a determinant of economic growth in a panel of countries. Using comparable data on disposable income from the Luxembourg Income Study, results show that aggregate inequality measures, such as Gini coefficients, can...