The standard economic theory suggests that capital should flow from rich to poor countries, unless the poor countries have lower overall productivity (Lucas, 1990) or a higher relative cost of investment (Caselli and Feyrer, 2007). Another prediction of the standard theory, arguably less controversial, is that capital should flow into countries undergoing a sustained increase in total factor pr...

Data envelopment analysis (DEA), originally developed to study production efficiency of micro-level organizations, has recently been used to construct a production-frontier approach to the analysis of international macroeconomic growth and convergence patterns. DEA methods are used to construct the convex production frontier and this construction is then employed to decompose productivity growt...

This paper examines the reiationship between the legal system and banldng development and traces this connection through to long-ran rates of per capita GDP growth, capital stock growth, and productivity growth. Tlie data indicate that countries where the legal system (1) emphasizes creditor rights and (2) rigorously enforces contracts have better-developed banks than countries where laws do no...

Improving the living standards of populations is a widespread societal objective. A cornerstone of living standards is the ability of individuals to earn wages and profits in order to purchase goods and services for consumption. In turn, wages and profits reflect the value of the goods and services produced in an economy and the productivity of the factor inputs used to produce them. Though liv...