This paper looks at how trade liberalization and institutional quality influence real income. Previous evidence has provided mixed results, and we find that indicators representing trade liberalization have been very weak. By using strongly balanced panel data of 45 Sub-Saharan African countries...

In the euro area, there is mixed evidence that the GDP per capita of lower-income economies has been catching up with that of higher-income economies since the start of monetary union. The significant real convergence performance of some of the most recent members contrasts with that of the...

Structural policies in the euro area are of great interest for the Eurosystem, particularly as they can support the smooth functioning of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and the effectiveness of monetary policy. This paper adopts a broad definition of structural policies, analysing not...

This paper reports the results of a study of the impact of government expenditures on economic growth, emphasizing how government effectiveness in developing nations influences the productivity of government spending. The effects of categories of government spending on growth are also examined....

The aim of this paper is to analyse the effect of institutions on economic growth. On the one hand, we present an analysis of the existing theoretical and empirical studies, which have achieved wide consensus regarding the positive effects of institutional quality. On the other hand, we identify...

In this paper, a new indicator of bureaucratic quality is developed that has extensive coverage across countries (175) and time (1960-2000), based on data collection from the World Development Indicators and the International Finance Statistics databases. Both anecdotal and econometric evidence...

This paper investigates the impact of foreign aid on the quality of institutions in recipient countries. Our identification strategy exploits the shift in US foreign policy due the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001 as a quasi-natural experiment. The associated change in...

A great deal of the foreign aid-growth literature finds that the net effect of aggregate aid on total growth appears to be insignificant. This study argues that this aid-growth nexus can be better explained by testing the variation responses for each of growth sectors to their corresponding...