This study examines the effects of cross-border flows - FDI, FPI, and FBL - on growth and savings rates using data on 56 countries from 1969 through 1998. Very generally, few flow measures are significant determinants of real variables. However, consideration of the initial level of financial...

Few studies address the real effects of international capital flows. Instead of a cross-sectional design, this study exclusively examines time-series data from nine countries. Four cases - Nigeria, Zimbabwe, India, and Pakistan - produce evidence that either FDI or FPI adversely affect growth or...

This review examines the empirical literature on financial flows and economic performance, with particular respect to foreign direct investment (FDI), foreign portfolio investment (FPI), and foreign bank lending (FBL). Few studies report unequivocal positive statistical relations between flows...

Recent studies report that equity market liberalisation positively correlates with total return, which in turn purportedly increases private investment growth. While the finding on reform and performance is generally robust to alternative perspectives on capital account liberalisation that...

The absence of continuous regime type measures that focus on institutions rather than outcomes besets studies on whether democratic or authoritarian regimes grow faster. Additional shortcomings include the failure to consider development stages and the erroneous endogenous specification of...

Econometric studies of income distribution that include institutional determinants suffer from specification bias—economists do not consider a more complete ensemble of factors that possibly influence equality. While there is no “true” specification, panel and time-series regressions...

The long literature on intergenerational transmission of well-being has largerly been driven by concerns for inequality of opportunity and the persistence of low levels of wellbeing among certain social groups.A comparative strand of this literature seeks to compare indicators of these...

Multidimensional measures provide an alternative lens through which poverty may be viewed and understood. In recent work we have attempted to offer a practical approach to identifying the poor and measuring aggregate poverty (Alkire and Foster 2011). As this is quite a departure from traditional...

This paper reexamines key results from the measurement of opportunity freedom, or the extent to which a set of options offers a decision maker real opportunities to achieve. Three cases are investigated: no preferences, a single preference, and plural preferences. The three co the cardinality...

Multidimensional poverty measures give rise to a host of statistical hypotheses which are of interest to applied economists and policy-makers alike. In the specific context of the generalized Alkire-Foster (Alkire and Foster 2008) class of measures, we show that many of these hypotheses can be...