The slow economic recovery since the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession requires state and local governments to continue to make difficult decisions concerning which taxes to raise and which expenditures to decrease in order to maintain a balanced budget. As expenditures usually raise...

In the context of growing regional disparities which exist both in developed and developing countries, the primary goal of this paper is to examine the influence of total economic activities on regional disparities. In the research panel sample of the selected OECD countries has been used with...

We use U.S. county-level data to estimate convergence rates for 22 individual states. We find significant heterogeneity. E.g., the California estimate is 19.9 percent and the New York estimate is 3.3 percent. Convergence rates are essentially uncorrelated with income levels

Previous research has evaluated New Zealand's growth performance in the context of a decade of microeconomic and macroeconomic reforms, and concluded that on balance there is scope for cautious optimism on the sustainability of recently improved economic growth (Hall, 1995, 1996). That research...

We examine the role of democracy shocks in the cross-country economic growth processes over a period of five decades since 1960. The recent uprisings that arose independently and spread across the Arab world form the main context of our investigation. We study if (i) a shock to democracy in one...

In this paper, we examine the role of spillovers in economic growth for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region by accounting for spatial effects. Such spatial effects in growth for the MENA countries may arise on the basis of geography, bilateral trade or institutional similarities. We...

Over the last decades, there has been a vast amount of literature on the subject of Research and Development (R&D) expenditure as a main driver of economic growth, both at national and sub-national levels. This being so, the main purpose of this manuscript is to investigate the role played by...

In the present paper, we are going to analyse the concept of economic growth as a factor in the revitalization of the knowledge-based society. Although the whole economic and human development occurred under the auspices of knowledge, making progress possible in all its aspects and...

Recent literatures on entrepreneurship and economic growth estimate the empirical relationships between the following pairs of variables: (1) institutions and entrepreneurial activity; (2) institutions and economic growth; and (3) entrepreneurship and economic growth. This paper revisits each of...

We use U.S. county data (3,058 observations) and 41 conditioning variables to study growth and convergence. Using OLS and 3SLS-IV we report on the full sample and metro, non-metro, and 5 regional samples: (1) OLS yields convergence rates around 2 percent; 3SLS yields 6–8 percent; (2)...