Recent empirical studies question conventional wisdom about the importance of education to growth. These results partly reflect how international differences in the quality of education systems--defined by the systems'ability to produce one marginal unit of productive human capital--are not...

Why do different countries have different long-term savings and growth rates? Why is the productivity rate not the same around the world? Recent new theories of endogenous growth have tried to answer these questions by replacing the usual assumption of diminishing returns in production. The...

Most models of economic growth are infinite horizon models that neglect the role of human capital in shaping life-cycle variables. This paper introduces training decisions in a life-cycle model to study the role of human capital both in life-cycle behavior and as an engine of growth. The crucial...

The authors investigate the relationship between foreign technology imports and economic growth in developing countries. They develop an intertemporal endogenous growth model that explicitly accepts foreign technology imports as a factor of production. The model establishes a link between the...

Indonesia's"big bang"decentralization in 2001 shifted much of the responsibility for local economic development from central government to district and city governments, which today number more than 450. But the performance of these districts has varied widely. This paper attempts to understand...

Using an economy-wide conceptual framework, the author analyzes how land registration affects financial development and economic growth in Thailand. He uses contemporary techniques, such as error correction and co-integration, to deal with such problems as time-series data not being stationary....

This paper examines the country-level dynamics of long-run growth in Africa between 1975 and 2005. The authors examine how growth has affected mobility and the distribution of income among countries. They analyze changes in cross-country income structure and convergence, and look for evidence of...

Joining the European Union (EU) is perhaps the key political and economic objective of Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries as they approach the 21st century. But how successful the CEE countries are in achieving this goal depends not only on how well and quickly they adapt their legal...

Is there a correlation between productivity and product variety? Certainly it appears that the rich countries are more productive and have more product variety than the poor nations. In fact, the relationship is quite strong when measured in levels. Does this same correlation hold up when...

Joseph Schumpeter argued in 1911 that the services provided by financial intermediaries - mobilizing savings, evaluating projects, managing risk, monitoring managers, and facilitating transactions -stimulate technological innovation and economic development. The authors present evidence that...