Out of around 200 countries in the world, only 75 have number portability. What are the international factors that explain the diffusion of this regulatory policy? Research on policy diffusion offers several explanations: constructivist, coercion, competition, and learning. Each of these...

The authors discuss the ambiguities surrounding allusions often made to global energy governance, focusing mainly on the question of energy transit. They discuss how the issue has been sanctioned in various regimes in international law (including the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas, the...

Energy metrics is the development of a whole new theoretical framework for the conception and measurement of energy and economic performances, energy efficiency and productivity improvements with important political economy implications consistent with the best use of all natural and economic...

It is widely recognized that railways were one of the most important drivers of economic growth in the 19th and 20th century, but it is less recognized that railways had a different impact across countries. In this paper, we first estimate the growth impact of Indian railways, one of the largest...

Using cross-country differences in the degree of isolation before the advent of technologies in sea and air transportation, we assess the relationship between geographic isolation and financial development across the globe. We find that pre-historic geographical isolation has been beneficial to...

We take a long-term perspective (1900-2008) to examine the causal relationship between foreign trade and economic growth for Spain. Results from both Johansen's (1988) and Toda and Yamamoto's (1995) methodologies are quite consistent. For the first six decades of the 20th century, a sub-period...

Most new rail transit lines in the United States and around the world are either light rail, including lines that sometimes run in or cross city streets, or heavy rail, which are built in exclusive rights of way, usually elevated or in subways. Heavy rail costs far more to build than light rail,...

While the auditing profession in the USA and UK has developed ‘from the bottom up' over more than a century and a half, the Chinese profession has effectively been created ‘from the top down' in just over 20 years. Based mainly on information obtained from interviews we have conducted in...