Donors in development cooperation increasingly emphasize the importance of public accountability in developing countries for the good functioning of democratic institutions, governance and the effectiveness of their aid. Political parties are prime actors in a democratic society that have...

This paper was prepared to present at the Farmer First Revisited: 20 Years On conference at IDS, University of Sussex, UK, December 2007. Its focus is the challenge of strengthening agricultural innovation systems. The paper prefaces this discussion by reflecting on an apparent paradox. While...

National framework conditions mediate the effect of technological capabilities of firms on their productivity. Although this has been recognized in the literature for a long time, a quantitative test that explicitly considers this hypothesis has been lacking. Using a World Bank datasets of about...

This research investigates the role of social capital and government intervention in explaining the differences of innovation output and economic growth for regions of the European Union from 1990-2002. Using several measures of social capital and innovation, and the European Union’s Objective...

This paper investigates the interplay between social capital, innovation and economic growth in the European Union. We identify innovation as an important mechanism that transforms social capital into economic growth. In an empirical investigation of 102 European regions in the period 1990-2002,...

The Porter Hypothesis postulates that the costs of compliance with environmental standards may be offset by adoption of innovations they trigger. We model this hypothesis using a game of timing of technology adoption. We show that times of adoption are earlier the higher the non-adoption tax....

During the recent period, we observe that many countries compete with each other to attract foreign investment. When MNCs invest in a host country, it is assumed that a part of their technology spills to the host country firms. But the empirical studies on spillover effects of FDI have failed to...

How much does public capital matter for economic growth? How large should it be? This paper attempts to answer these questions, taking the case of SSA countries. It develops and estimates a model that posits a nonlinear relationship between public investment and growth, to determine the...

The science-technology-innovation system is one that is continuously and rapidly evolving. The dramatic growth over the last twenty years in the use of science, technology and innovation (STI) indicators appears first and foremost the result of a combination between on the one hand the easiness...

We consider a stochastic environment to study interactions among pollution growth, demographic changes, and economic growth. Drawing on the empirical findings of slow convergence patterns of pollution shocks (viz., with a long-memory), we build an analytical framework where stochastic...