The objective of this paper is to provide some stylized facts on the links between current account deficits and a broad set of economic variables proposed by the literature. In order to accomplish this task, we complement and extend previous empirical research by (1) using a large and consistent...

This paper examines the determinants of growth for nine South Pacific countries during the period 1971-93, using the analytical framework of the Solow-Swan neoclassical growth model. Chamberlain’s II-matrix estimator is used to account for unobserved country-specific heterogeneity in the...

This paper analyzes common economic patterns across countries and economic sectors in Latin America, East Asia and Europe for the period 1970–94 by means of an error-components model that decomposes real value added growth in each country into common international effects, sector-specific...

We reexamine the association between poverty, the middle class, and institutional outcomes using a newly developed cross-country panel dataset containing detailed information on the distribution of income and expenditure. When the size of the middle class increases (measured as the proportion of...

The extent to which local communities benefit from commodity booms has been subject to wide but inconclusive investigations. This paper draws from a new district-level database to investigate the local impact on socioeconomic outcomes of mining activity in Peru, which grew almost twentyfold in...

This paper examines the growth experience of nine South Pacific countries during the period 1971-93, using the analytical framework of the Solow-Swan neoclassical growth model, panel data, and Chamberlain's Î-matrix estimator. The speed of convergence of South Pacific countries to their...

Recent empirical studies have examined the determinants of economic growth using country-average (cross-sectional) data. By contrast, this paper employs a technique for using a panel of cross-sectional and time series data for 98 countries over the 1960-85 period to determine the quantitative...

Although conventional wisdom suggests that reducing military spending may improve a country's economic growth performance, empirical studies have produced ambiguous results. This paper extends a standard growth model and obtains consistent panel data estimates of the growth retarding effects of...

Adopting a legal definition of informality, this paper studies the causes of informality in general and with a particular application to Mexico. It starts with a discussion on the definition and measures of informality. It then argues and provides evidence that informality is not only a...

This article studies the evolution of the private saving rate in India during 1960-95. Its distinctive feature is that it proposes three new measures of private saving, which are incremental improvements to the (naive) national accounts measure. The improvements consist of accounting for capital...