Based on two detailed Balassa-Samuelson (BS) studies, Wagner and Hlouskova (2004) for eight Central Eastern European countries (CEECs) and Wagner and Doytchinov (2004) for ten Western European countries (WECs), this study assesses the differences and similarities of the BS effect between these...

The transition from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has shifted the policy debate from growth to 'quality of growth' (QG). The April 2015 World Bank publication on MDGs extreme poverty targets has revealed that poverty has been decreasing in all...

Recent research highlights the considerable potential of industrial policy to support structural transformation in sub-Saharan Africa. Given the importance of the state in industrial policy, this paper considers the implications for these discussions of recent work on state fragility. It argues...

The temporal interdependence between saving and output has been in focus in a number of recent empirical studies. Results from these studies have compelled some authors to question the traditional notion of a causal chain where saving leads growth through capital accumulation. This paper...

The age distribution is seldom taken into consideration in macroeconomic, and macro-econometric papers. This in spite of the fact that established economic theories predict that demographic factors will affect the aggregate economy. This paper focuses on economic growth and investigates...

Policy in developed countries is often based on the assumption that higher business ownership rates induce economic value. Recent microeconomic empirical evidence casts doubts on the validity of this assumption or, at least, leads to a more nuanced view: Especially the top performing business...

Regression analyses of cross-country economic growth data are complicated by two main forms of model uncertainty: the uncertainty in selecting explanatory variables and the uncertainty in specifying the functional form of the regression function. Most discussions in the literature address these...

We study economic growth in four emerging economies - Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC). Questions addressed are: (a) How do medium term growth determinants differ from short term determinants? (b) What are differences between growth effects of aggregate versus disaggregated exports? And...

Does democracy promote economic growth? There is still an ongoing debate over the economic implications of democracy, and this question has gained critical importance particularly in the African context, where a wave of democratization in the early 1990s coincided with the start of a new era of...

In the present study, labor markets were analyzed, in particular, the reasons of low labor force rate to make sense based on the data of Turkish economy. While in the advanced economies, the labor force rate is quite high and has small fluctuations around a certain extent over a long-term. In...