Wide-ranging structural reforms are underway in Italy, aimed at addressing key bottlenecks in the product and labor markets. Our analysis, based on the IMF's Global Integrated Monetary and Fiscal model (GIMF), attempts to quantify the potential gains to the economy from a comprehensive package...

The East African Community (EAC) has been among the fastest growing regions in sub-Saharan Africa in the past decade or so. Nonetheless, the recent growth path will not be enough to achieve middle-income status and substantial poverty reduction by the end of the decade-the ambition of most...

The purpose of this paper is to highlight a version of the Balassa-Samuelson effect for emerging countries with a new dataset. More than the catching-up effect, we will measure the convergence for three emerging countries: Brazil/China/India. We will compare the convergence between these...

The purpose of this paper is to empirically determine the effects of political instability on economic growth. By using the system-GMM estimator for linear dynamic panel data models on a sample covering up to 169 countries, and five year periods from 1960 to 2004, we find that higher degrees of...

In this paper, we study the role of risk-sharing in entrepreneurship-driven innovation. Studying entrepreneurship and innovation entails modeling an occupational choice and an effort choice. Risk-sharing may increase the number of individuals who become entrepreneurs by limiting the downside...

The purpose of this paper is to empirically determine the effects of political instability on economic growth. Using the system-GMM estimator for linear dynamic panel data models on a sample covering up to 169 countries, and 5-year periods from 1960 to 2004, we find that higher degrees of...

The productivity slowdown in Europe since the mid-1990s is a reason for concern. Labour market rigidity, hampering innovation, may be a cause of the slowdown. In the paper this argument is placed in a broader perspective. Labour force participation is an important factor in explaining...

We propose a new set of indices to capture the multidimensionality of a country's institutional quality. Our indices are obtained by employing a dimension reduction approach on the institutional variables provided by the Frazer Institute (2018). We estimate the impact that our measures of...