This paper argues that institutional quality has both direct and indirect (moderating) effects on productivity of countries. These hypotheses are tested using a battery of institutional proxies (governance, economic freedom, intellectual property rights and ease of doing business) and two...

Foreign direct investment inflows are positively related to economic growth across developing countries — but so are savings in excess of investment. This paper develops an explanation for these known empirical findings by focusing on the limited availability of consumer credit in developing...

This paper evaluates the performance of Consensus Forecasts of GDP growth for industrialized and developing countries from 1989 to 1998. The questions addressed are (1) How do forecast errors differ across industrialized and developing countries? (2) How well do forecasters predict recessions?...

Recent years have witnessed a change in the composition of capital flows to developing countries, and FDI and equity flows have been playing an increasing role. In this paper we discuss the challenges for international macroeconomics that these developments pose and characterize stylized facts...

At a conceptual level, opening of capital markets entails a number of benefits and costs. One major cost of financial openness is output volatility. In this paper, using data from 21 advanced and 81 developing countries during 1971-2010, we empirically examine the impact of capital market...

We model the effect of democracy on North-South bilateral foreign direct investment (FDI), and test its impact in a panel of 14 source countries and 24 host countries over 1992-2004. As a benchmark, we adopt a setup that combines variables commonly associated with horizontal FDI (economic...

The paper investigates whether free capital mobility leads a government to tighten its budget deficit for fear of being penalized from the international capital market. The author tests the hypothesis using three-stage least squares (3SLS), which can control for the endogenous nature of capital...

Evidence is presented on the Real Interest Parity Hypothesis for a set of emerging and developed countries. This is done by carrying out a set of unit-root tests on the real interest differentials with respect to Germany and the US. Our results support the hypothesis of a rapid reversion towards...

This paper evaluates the evidence for uncovered and real interest parity at the long horizons for the non-G7 economies. We examine the behavior of exchange rates and interest differentials for bonds with 5-year maturity. Although there are substantial differences in the results among countries,...

This paper is motivated by a set of cross-country observations on economic growth, structural transformation, and investment rates in a large sample of countries, We observe a hump-shaped relationship between a country’s investment rate and its level of development, both within countries over...