Does GDP composition affect GDP growth and volatility? Typically, economies at advanced stages of development grow slower, are less volatile and have a larger share of services in GDP with respect to economies at middle stages. I propose a theory of development consistent with these three facts....

One of the most heated debates in development theory in recent decades concerns the causes and trends of income disparities, both between countries and between the different regions that make up national economies. The crucial question that set off this controversy is whether, in the long run,...

We study historical tax revenue downturn episodes—where tax revenue-to-GDP ratios decline sharply—and explore the link between tax revenues and imports. We document that downturn episodes of at least 1 percentage point of GDP in one year are common. The tax types that account for these...

The paper focuses on the impact of international core labor standards on long-term per-capita income. In order to do that, it is necessary to build a new synthetic indicator of labor standards using multiple correspondence analysis, measuring the four core labor standards recognized by ILO. We...

This paper analyzes the histories of revisions of official annual real gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates for six regional members of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) - People's Republic of China; India; Indonesia; Republic of Korea; Taipei,China; and Thailand - for the period 1990-2004 as...

We show how technical change, measured as a shift in the GDP function, is combined with net income to track welfare change. This provides a bridge between the productivity literature and the welfare-related literature that tends to reason in terms of net product functions: although the relevant...

Public debt has surged during the current global economic crisis and is expected to increase further. This development has raised concerns whether public debt is starting to hit levels where it might negatively affect economic growth. Does such a tipping point in public debt exist? How severe...

Most evidence for the resource curse comes from cross-country growth regressions suffers from a bias originating from the high and ever-evolving volatility in commodity prices. This paper addresses these issues by providing new cross-country empirical evidence for the effect of resources in...

This paper proposes an alternative multidimensional graphical modeling approach to visualize and analyze a large number of variables that involve in the construction of the GDP. This multi-dimensional graphical modeling opens new opportunities for economists, academics and policy makers to...

This study examines the effect of GDP per capita on the Gini index, which measures income concentration, in Colombia. The methodology used is an econometric analysis of time series with data extracted from the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank. The econometric results suggest...