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...

This study is a first contribution to prioritization across productivity determinant capabilities that attempts to obtain the equivalent of a "shadow price" for each of these capabilities by estimating their impact on the success a country may have in reaching higher income per capita groups....

We construct a panel data at the state level in Mexico for the years 2006, 2008 and 2011 in order to investigate the impact that entry deregulation efforts have on the cost of opening new businesses in Mexico, where this cost is taken from the Doing Business in Mexico report of the World Bank....

We measure risk attitudes in 30 different countries in a controlled, incentivized experiment (N = 3025). At the macroeconomic level, we find a strong and highly significant negative correlation between the risk tolerance of a country and income per capita. This gives rise to a paradox, seen that...

Acemoglu, Johnson, Robinson, and Yared (2008) document that the cross-country correlation between income per capita and democracy disappears once including country fixed effects. This paper tests the hypothesis that the effect of income on democracy might differ systematically across countries....

We investigate the evolution of global welfare in two dimensions: income per capita and life expectancy. First, we estimate the marginal distributions of income and life expectancy separately. More importantly, in contrast to previous univariate approaches, we consider income and life expectancy...

The physical or absolute geography of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is often blamed for its poor economic performance. A country's location however not only determines its absolute geography, it also pins down its relative position on the globe vis-à-vis other countries. This paper assesses the...

Or Paradox Regained? The answer is Paradox Regained. New data confirm that for countries worldwide long-term trends in happiness and real GDP per capita are not significantly positively related. The principal reason that Paradox critics reach a different conclusion, aside from problems of data...

Schumpeter's concept of creative destruction as the engine of capitalist development is well-known. However, that the destructive part of creative destruction is a social cost and therefore biases our estimate of the impact of the innovation on NNP and on welfare is hardly acknowledged, with the...

Many economies of the world respond differently to economic reforms. While some countries reap the full benefits of reforms, other countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, are struggling. There are underlying cultural factors that act as impediments to economic success. Using IBM/Hofstede...