We estimate the effects of major roads and public transit on the growth of major cities in the US between 1980 and 2000. We find that a 10% increase in a city’s stock of roads causes about a 2% increase in its population and employment and a small decrease in its share of poor households over...

The paper examines the proposed Economic and Monetary Union for ECOWAS sub-region and provide a comprehensive evidence based on European Union experience of what ECOWAS common currency stand to gain in terms of both Intra and Inter flow of FDI. Evidence from the reviewed literature revealed...

The United States transformed itself from a rural to an urban society over the last three centuries. After a century of unremarkable growth, the pace of urbanization was historically unprecedented between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the twentieth century, the urban...

This paper examines how a traditional village deals with the consequences of population growth. The increase in population demands more intensive use of the land which requires the transformation of commonly-owned land into privately-owned land. Customary law contains clear prescriptions about...

We use a simple analytical framework to study how idiosyncratic production shocks are smoothed through risksharing across Spanish provinces. By analyzing how production in the average province is successively smoothed until it is used as consumption, we find that half of the shocks have been...

Many small island economies (SIEs) and micro-states host offshore finance centres (OFCs). Their low tax, minimalist regulatory regimes and bank secrecy make these OFCs highly attractive to global financial capitalism. The uneven relationship between transnational financial institutions operating...

This paper compares the evolution of regional disparities in per capita incomes in Canade and the 12 American states along Canada's southern border. The phenomenon of capital accumulation as described by the neoclassical growth model can explain much of the observe decline in regional dispersion...

This paper analyzes empirically a public policy promoting industrial clusters in France. Cluster policies have become popular in many countries but have not been extensively evaluated empirically. We use data on production and employment for firms that benefited from the policy and on firms that...

The literature on localised knowledge spillovers and growth focuses on the relative importance of intra vs. inter-industry externalities, but the nature and the characteristics of the dynamic linkages across manufacturing sectors are not investigated. In this Paper we perform a very...