China has experienced remarkably stable growth and inflation in recent years according to official statistics. We construct alternative estimates using detailed information on Chinese household-purchasing patterns. As households become richer, a smaller fraction of total expenditures are spent...

Africa has in the long-term been the lowest-income and the most underdeveloped region of the world economy with a marginal share in world GDP and influence on the international economic order. Most of its inhabitants suffer from a lack of basic human needs. However, nowadays some African...

Mexico, as other Latin American countries, undertook far-reaching economic reforms in the 1980s and 1990s in a wide array of areas: trade and industrial policy, foreign investment and capital account, privatization of public enterprises and deregulation of economic activities, among others. As a...

Periodically referred to as the cradle of civilization, an adage reflecting its past economic success and growth, the Middle East and North Africa region continues to serve as an international focal point, albeit a disappointing one in light of its economic potential. Therefore, the purpose of...

The Theory of the Growth of the Firm proposed a process theory of growth based on the pursuit of knowledge and unconstrained by government, hence applicable only to an economy where the corporation is the dominant form of industrial organization. In her subsequent studies of foreign direct...

Are individuals more sensitive to losses than gains in macroeconomic growth? Using subjective well-being measures across three large data sets, we observe an asymmetry in the way positive and negative economic growth are experienced, with losses having more than twice as much impact on...

This paper aims at estimating the effect of different types of institutions on economic development. To tackle the endogeneity problem that is prevalent, an identification strategy exploiting the heteroskedasticity in the data is used. This also allows to analyze the reverse effect, running from...

The new models of development take into account the influence of social capital in inducing the economic growth. Assuming that trust is one of the main dimensions of the social capital, we demonstrate that it is able to reduce the transaction costs and to lay off large amounts that can be...

The co-existence of the ‘twin’ banking and currency crises in emerging market economies has raised concerns regarding the underlying causes and potential remedies. Literatures suggest that there are at least three major approaches that could be used to explain the phenomenon: the...

In this paper, we apply a convex hull approach to counterfactual analysis of trade openness and growth. The experiments we choose evaluate the importance of trade openness for growth across African countries. Specifically, we ask the question "what would happen if African countries were more...