We estimate the effect of four types of education qualifications, as a proxy for human capital and skill levels, on GDP per capita, and compute the average percentage returns. We also test the effect of the product of each proxy of human capital with R&D on GDP per capita. We find that only...

Modern economic theories explain differences in productivity and economic growth across countries by differences in political and economic institutions, and differences in culture, geographical location, policies, and laws. The success of any of these theories in explaining the gap in...

Qualification and occupation-based measures of skilled labour are constructed to explain the skill premium – the wage of skilled labour relative to unskilled labour in New Zealand. The data exhibit a more rapid growth in the supply of skilled labour than the skill premium, and a very large...

The Gulf Cooperation Council countries (GCC) include Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Their monetary policy objective is to stabilize the foreign price, i.e., exchange rate instead of the domestic price level, where the nominal interest rate is equalized with the US...

Using the work – leisure choice model, this paper computes equilibrium hours-worked for a number of Arab, non-oil-producing and labor-abundant countries and major oil-producing, tax-free and labor-scarce countries, for which actual data are unavailable. We estimate hours-worked for the G7, and...

Unanticipated shocks could lead to instability, which is reflected in statistically significant changes in distributions of independent Gaussian random variables. Changes in the conditional moments of stationary variables are predictable. We provide a framework based on a statistic for the...

Modern economic theories explain differences in productivity and economic growth by differences in political and economic institutions, and differences in culture, geographical location, policies, and laws. Another new strand of the literature explains productivity and economic growth...

In the diversity of exchange rate regimes in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in the 1980s, there was a trend toward more flexible regimes and smaller parallels markets. How particular exchange rate arrangements affect such factors as output supply cannot be determined for SSA countries on the basis of...