Does the financial sector contribute to economic growth? While most of the studies carried out before the Financial crisis tend to answer the question with “yes”, recent empirical work provides evidence that the opposite is true. We study these new findings in detail, applying GMM and 3SLS...

Income differences arise from many sources. While some kinds of inequality, caused by effort differences, might be associated with faster economic growth, other kinds, arising from unequal opportunities for investment, might be detrimental to economic progress. We construct two new metadata...

This work shows the asymmetric effect of the reduction in transportation costs across different sectors in the process of the Great Divergence. Specifically, the analysis indicates that reductions in transportation costs of industrial goods enhance convergence of the growth rates of trading...

Rational politicians are interested in judicial independence (JI) in order to make their promises credible. But if politicians preferences deviate from the dicta of the judiciary, they also have incentives to renege on judicial independence. These two conflicting aspects are measured by two...

The study reveals that there is a relationship between foreign direct investments, trade, and growth rate of per capita GDP for Bangladesh with the help of annual time series data for 1973 to 2014. The Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) analysis shows that there is a long-term relationship...

This article reviews the use of the concept of political instability in economic research, the importance of which has been growing in recent years due to its potentially profound economic consequences. The article explores this concept by working through the definitions, dimensions, and methods...

A fundamental question in social sciences relates to the effect of wealth inequality on economic growth. Yet, in tackling the question, researchers have had to use income as a proxy for wealth. We derive a global measure of wealth inequality from Forbes magazine's listing of billionaires and...

The interaction between environmental pollution and economic growth determines the achievement of the green growth objective of developing economies. An economy turns around the inverted U-shaped Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) when pollution is effectively dampened by social, political and...