This paper empirically assesses the role of structural and institutional reforms in driving productivity growth across countries at different stages of development, using a distance-to-frontier framework. It gauges whether particular policies and reforms matter more for increasing productivity...

The author has recently, defining a catch-up index, growth as catching-up, and deriving an equation for years for absolute convergence, shown Sub-Saharan Africa has fallen behind sharply and, even considering India's population-weight, South Asia has barely shown any growth since 1951 (growing...

This paper explores the impact of foreign aid on economic growth using variation in aid inflows from natural disasters. Because using a country's own disaster exposure as an instrument for aid inflows violates exogeneity assumptions, I instead use the disaster exposure of a country's "aid...

We construct and estimate a unified model combining three of the main sources of cross-country income disparities: differences in factor endowments, barriers to technology adoption and the inappropriateness of frontier technologies to local conditions. The key components are different types of...

This paper examines the trajectory of growth in the Global South. Before the 1500s all countries were roughly at the same level of development, but from the 1500s Western countries started to grow faster than the rest of the world and PPP GDP per capita by 1950 in the US, the richest Western...

Foreign aid is an important means of finance for governments of developing countries. The current study investigates whether too much inflow of aid to developing countries is beneficial or harmful to their economy and whether institutional quality and economic freedom matters in aid–growth...

Empirical tests in the 1990s found little evidence of poor countries catching up with rich - unconditional convergence - since the 1960s, and divergence over longer periods. This stylized fact spurred several developments in growth theory, including AK models, poverty trap models, and the...

Eco-industrial parks are a form of industrial parks that seems to gain more and more interest in the developed and emerging countries. In the introduction, the paper presents the reasons that justify the presence of an eco-industrial park on a territory and continues stressing their main...

A basic intellectual challenge for those concerned with the poverty of nations is to come to grips with the nature and causes of the wealth of the world's wealthier nations. One might then be in a position to inform the poorer nations how they might achieve similar outcomes. This paper is...