There are high economic expectations concerning the emergence of Big Data: a promised golden age for both consumers and firms. Digital technology allows firms to provide digital services in exchange of personal data, from which they can finetune their supply to better match market demand. By...

Purpose: This paper examines the effect of external debt on economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in view of an upsurge in the level of external debt in many countries on the continent. Design/methodology/approach: The paper uses annual data for 39 SSA countries from 1990 to 2013 and...

This paper questions the three standard propositions used by politico-economic models of growth and distribution according to which (1) rising inequality induces more government redistribution; (2) more government redistribution is financed by higher distortionary taxation; and (3) higher...

It is sometimes argued that more advertising raises consumption which in turn stimulates output and so economic growth. We test this hypothe- sis using annual German data expressed in terms of GDP for the period 1950-2000. We find that advertising does not Granger-cause growth but Granger-causes...

In this paper, I discuss the reasons for Costa Rica's economic performance over the last quarter of a century. Three complementary sets of policies (investments in human capital, careful stabilization, and an intelligent and aggressive integration into the world economy) explain the successful...

Economic development in Latin America has trailed most other world regions over the past four decades despite its relatively high initial development and school attainment levels. This puzzle can be resolved by considering the actual learning as expressed in tests of cognitive skills, on which...

We investigate whether a causal interpretation of the robust association between cognitive skills and economic growth is appropriate and whether cross-country evidence supports a case for the economic benefits of effective school policy. We develop a new common metric that allows tracking...

Barriers to investment are often regarded as an important determinant of the variation in international income levels. Nevertheless, in the standard neoclassical growth model, these barriers have only have small effects on per capita incomes. We consider the effects of barriers to accumulation...

In this paper we clarify the impact that barriers to capital accumulation can have on a two-sector neoclassical growth model's ability to explain the observed differences in incomes across countries. We show that the effect of barriers to technology adoption in a two sector model is necessarily...

The article criticizes the World Bank as overy optimistic concerning its ability to raise the effectiveness of aid by concentrating aid on countries with "good" policies. It is shown that aid flows to the main recipient regions yielded the highest correlation to growth when their magnitudes...