I use a dynamic Solow growth model, augmented with human capital, labor-hours, and oil prices, to show that Japan’s growth in GDP/adult over 1969-2007 can be explained as a process of convergence to a world steady-state rate of 1%/year. I find that each additional year of average schooling...

In his 1966 Inaugural Lecture at Cambridge, entitled On the Causes of the Slow Rate of Economic Growth in the UK, the Hungarian-born British economist, Nicholas Kaldor presented a series of "laws" to account for the growth rate differences between Britain on the one hand, and the more successful...

Though a country's economy is growing, separate regional development disparities could be even more significant. This paper aims to identify the situation of inequality of Lithuania's regions, taking into consideration the most important factors of regional economic growth and investments....

Real convergence is an essential objective of Romania's integration into the EU. Bridging the development gaps between Romania and the EU as soon as possible cannot be achieved exclusively through market forces, since they rather tend to cause divergence and polarization. For this purpose,...

We analyze the cross-national distribution of GDP per capita and its evolution from 1970 to 2003. We argue that peaks are not a suitable measure for distinct growth regimes, because the number of peaks is not invariant under strictly monotonic transformations of the data (e.g. original vs. log...

This paper examines the link between health indicators, environmental variables, and economic development, and the consequences of this relationship on economic convergence. In the early stage of economic development, the gain from income growth could be cancelled or mitigated by environmental...

This paper uses the adaptive LASSO estimator to determine the variables important for economic growth. The adaptive LASSO estimator is a computationally very simple procedure that performs at the same time both consistent parameter estimation and model selection. The methodology is applied to...

This study mainly examines the role of macroeconomic policy variables associated with Maastricht Convergence Criteria (MC), using various approaches to analyze comparatively differences in growth and convergence in income, productivity, and unemployment between a developed, economically...

Using changes in the possession of household assets over the past 20 years, several recent papers have argued that economic performance in Arica was substantially better than suggested by national income data and income poverty statistics, who suffer from well-known weaknesses. We scrutinize...