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...

This article reviews the current state of knowledge on the determinants of saving rates, presenting the main findings and contributions of the recently completed World Bank research project, “Saving Across the World”. The article discusses the basic design of the research project and its...

The recent upward trend in crime rates of developing countries has spurred widespread public concern about personal and proprietary insecurity. In some countries, the questions of crime, violence, and victimization are attracting more attention from academics and policy makers than traditional...

This study illustrates the mechanisms linking national saving and economic growth, with the purpose of understanding the possibilities and limits of a saving-based growth agenda in the context of the Egyptian economy. This is done through a simple theoretical model, calibrated to fit the...

The objectives of this paper are, first, to describe the developments in Chilean financial markets at the macroeconomic level and, then, to examine their effects at the level of firms. After reviewing the main government policies towards financial markets in the last three decades, the paper...

External exposure can be measured by the sensitivity of first and second moments of economic growth to openness and foreign shocks. This paper provides an empirical evaluation of external exposure using panel data methods for a worldwide sample of countries. Controlling for domestic conditions,...

The authors evaluate whether the level of development in the banking sector exerts a causal impact on economic growth and its sources-total factor productivity growth, physical capital accumulation, and private saving. They use (1) a pure cross-country instrumental variable estimator to extract...