This article suggests how state enterprises can be incorporated into the theoretical and empirical growth literature. Specifically, it shows that if state enterprises are less efficient than private firms, invest less, employ less skilled labor, and are less eager to adopt new technology, then a...

This paper deals with the implications of natural resources for the conduct of economic policies and the role and design of institutions in resource‐rich countries. The paper briefly reviews the experience of a few resource‐rich countries, highlighting the successes of those that have done...

We compare and contrast the economic growth performance of Croatia and Latvia since the collapse of communism in 1991 in an attempt to understand better the extent to which the growth differential between the two countries can be traced to increased efficiency in the use of capital and other...

This story describes the circumstances that led to all five of us starting as editors at the same time, the unexpected things we have found, the unanticipated reactions we have encountered, how we worked as an editorial team, the central role of the editorial office manager, how we managed to...

Under what conditions can the European Neighbourhood Policy achieve one of its main objectives: to resolve conflicts in the European Union's neighbourhood? In the spirit of Montesquieu and Monnet, the basic hypothesis of the EU is that closer economic integration encourages governments to take...

We use a new dataset on non-resource GDP to examine the impact of commodity price volatility on economic growth in a panel of up to 158 countries during the period 1970-2007. Our main finding is that commodity price volatility leads to a significant increase in non-resource GDP growth in...

We examine the effect of the interaction between resource rents and democracy on corruption for a panel of 29 Sub-Saharan countries during the period from 1985 to 2007. We find that higher resource rents lead to more corruption and that the effect is significantly stronger in less democratic...

This paper is intended to clarify the contribution of macroeconomic stabilization and structural adjustment to the transformation from plan to market in Central and Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Four main points emerge. First, increased price stability improves the utilization of capital and...

This paper identifies some of the main determinants of exports and economic growth in cross-sectional data from the World Bank, covering 160 countries in the period 1985-1994. First, the linkages between the propensity to export and population, per capita income, agriculture, primary exports,...