This paper explores how civic capital shapes the relationship between government size and economic performance. Building on an exogenousgrowth version of Barro (1990), we incorporate O-ring technology to capture task complementarity in the public sector, highlighting the role of civic capital in...

We analyze the empirical relationship between growth, country size and tourism specialization by using a dataset covering the period 1980-2003. We find that small tourism countries grow significantly faster than all the other sub-groups considered in our analysis. The reason for this is neither...

This paper aims at assessing whether dualistic mechanisms represent a significant component of the aggregate labor productivity convergence observed across the European regions in the 1980s. The potential of an explanation of convergence based in part, at least, on the existence of dualism in...

Specializing in tourism is an option available to a number of less developed countries and regions. But is it a good option? To answer this question, we have compared the relative growth performance of 14 "tourism countries" within a sample of 143 countries, observed during the period 1980-95....

We address the problem of measuring, in the absence of reliable indexes of technology levels, how much of the convergence we observe is due to convergence in technology or in capital-labour ratios. We first develop a growth model where technology accumulation in lagging economies depends on...

We address the problem of measuring, in the absence of reliable indices of technology levels, how much of the convergence we observe is due to convergence in technology or in capital-labour ratios. We first develop a growth model where technology accumulation in lagging economies depends on...