Low growth equilibria with low investment in human capital generally tend to persist till an external shock affects the economy. In this paper we use data on Christian missions to proxy a long-lasting educational shock in Africa. We estimate the effect of this shock on the quality of children...

This paper uses household surveys from 13 developing countries to describe consumption choices, health and education investments, employment patterns and other features of the of the economic lives of the middle classes defined as those whose daily consumption per capita is between $2 and $4 or...

The claim of globalization critics that the income gap to industrial countries is bound to widen for essentially all developing countries as a consequence of economic globalization is in conflict with empirical evidence. Economic performance differs tremendously across developing countries. We...

Remittances play an important role in human capital development in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly when it comes to helping families to pay for their children’s education, access health care and alleviate poverty. However, many countries on the continent lack the financial systems to...

We examine the importance of total factor productivity (TFP) growth in middle-income countries based on cross-country panel data for the period 1975-2014. We find that TFP growth contributed significantly to a country’s upward transition from middle-income to high-income country group. The TFP...

The aim of the paper is to examine the economic growth of 32 European countries from 2005 to 2015. This period was characterized by a strong growth prior to 2009, when the Great Recession started, and lasted until 2012-2013 in the majority of examined countries. The growth between 2005 and 2015...

This paper shows that an accelerated increase in educational attainments in many East Asian countries derives from a dramatic augmentation of working population with vocational education relative to general education. This is consistent with the recent literature, which argues that the ratio of...