Social instability is a concept that economists rarely analyse, and yet it can lurk behind much economic policy-making.  China’s leadership has often publicly expressed its concerns to avoid ‘social instability’.  It is viewed as a threat both to the political order and to...

This paper uses the pooled mean group estimator and an extended annual dataset to examine the effectiveness of aid on growth. The results indicate a significant long-run impact of aid on growth, but conditioning aid on `good` policy reduces the long-run growth rate.

The paper measures productivity growth in seventeen countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  GDP per worker and capital per worker in 1985 US dollars were estimated for 1820, 1850, 1880, 1913, 1939 by using historical national accounts to back cast Penn World Table data for 1965...