Germany remains Europe's largest and most diversified source of new technology, but still lags in the fastest growing areas of today's high technology. After World War II, West-German technology policy sought to rebuild the institutions which had supported Germany's leadership in the high-tech...

The article criticizes the World Bank as overy optimistic concerning its ability to raise the effectiveness of aid by concentrating aid on countries with "good" policies. It is shown that aid flows to the main recipient regions yielded the highest correlation to growth when their magnitudes...

This essay argues that economic systems should be defined in terms of clusters of complementary institutions. To show how such an approach can be carried out, I use a cluster analysis technique and data on forty different economic institutions in OECD nations to isolate four quite different...

This study compares the sources of growth in East Asia with the rest of the world, using a methodology that allows one to decompose total factor productivity (TFP) growth into technical efficiency changes (catching up) and technological progress. It applies a varying coefficients frontier...

It is argued that due to their general instability dynamic optimization models cannot be used as positive theories of economic growth. The argument is substantiated by (numerical) examples. A simple rule of thumb is provided as an alternative to the RKC model. This rule is shown to perform well...

One decade ago the formerly socialist, east-European economies collapsed. They are facing the diffcult and complex task to transform and to modernize their economic structures. In the beginning, many economists believed that the process of transition could be done fast and easily....

Building on the literature on regularization and dimension reduction methods, we have developed a quarterly forecasting model for euro area GDP. This method consists in bridging quarterly national accounts data using factors extracted from a large panel of monthly and quarterly series including...

We show that the effects of inflation on growth change substantially as the inflation rate rises. Moreover the nonlinearities are quite different for industrial economies than for developing countries. We find that the threshold at which inflation first begins to seriously negatively affect...

Five generic reforms, price liberalization, property privatization, macroeconomic stabilization, microeconomic restructuring and trade liberalization, are integrated into both exogenous and endogenous growth models. This integration allows one to assess the implications of each reform for a...

Recent biomedical research shows that roughly three-quarters of cognitive abilities are attributable to genetics and family environment. This paper presents a theory of growth in which human capital is determined by inheritable factors and family size. The distribution of income is shown to...