China is well-placed to avoid the so-called “middle-income trap” and to continue to converge towards the more advanced economies, even though growth is likely to slow from near double-digit rates in the first decade of this millennium to around 7% at the 2020 horizon. However, in order to...

An advanced economy relies on innovation activity for its further technology improvement. On the other hand a backward economy depends on both imitation from the world technology frontier and innovation activities - innovation being more skilled-intensive than imitation. In this paper I...

We analyze the joint dynamics of religious beliefs, scientific progress and coalitional politics along both religious and economic lines. History offers many examples of the recurring tensions between science and organized religion, but as part of the paper’s motivating evidence we also...

This article contributes to the growth literature by developing a formal growth model that provides the basis for studying institutions and technological innovation and examining how human capital and institutional constraints affect the transitional and steady state growth rates of output. The...

Corruption is a symptom and outcome of institutional deficiency, with potentially adverse effects on economic growth. This paper aims to provide a synthesis of the existing evidence on the relationship between corruption and economic growth - controlling for effect type, data sources, and...

Why has the living standard of the Philippines relative to that of the United States not risen unlike its Asian neighbors? Applying a simple neoclassical model and some empirical methods of analysis employed in growth economics on data on national income accounts and the workforce from the Penn...

This paper aims to study the effect of debt on economic growth of 19 developing countries over the period 1990-2011, through the use of a dynamic panel data model. The second part of this paper involves an empirical study of the effect that debt have on the contribution of investment to economic...

The study examines the relationship between the regulatory variables and economic growth on the basis of Bayesian model pooling applied to Blundell and Bond’s GMM system estimator. The areas of regulations (institutions) are measured by the following indicators: index of economic freedom,...

In this paper we argue that the answer is yes. Our optimism rests on the finding that differences in the level of institutional quality predict cross-country variation in African economic growth during the period 1995-2011. This finding is quite robust. It holds in OLS, LAD and 2SLS settings; it...

This exploratory study examines the impact of various forms of economic freedom and various dimensions of governance, as well as a number of economic factors, on economic growth among OECD nations. Empirical estimation finds that the natural log of per capita purchasing-power-parity adjusted...