POLICY QUESTION " What is the relationship between inequality and economic growth? Specifically, does income inequality hamper or foster economic growth in developing countries? " BACKGROUND As the global economy experienced rapid economic growth after World War II, an intense debate arose as to whether such growth benefited poor people and reduced income inequality or vice versa. In the 1950s,...

In this paper, we investigate the nexus between life insurance and suicide behavior using OECD cross-country data from 1980 to 2002. Through semiparametric instrumental variable regressions with fixed effects, we find that for the majority of observations, there exists a positive relationship between suicide rate and life insurance density (premium per capita). Since life insurance policies pay...

This paper aims to investigate the impact of exchange rate pass-through in dollarized economies to domestic inflation and economic growth: evidence from Southeast Asian countries. The panel data for five selected countries (Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, the Philippines and Vietnam) over the period 2000-2015 is employed. The empirical results by using fixed effects estimation found that there is...

Country-level longitudinal data at three-year intervals over 1990–2004 are used to analyze the factors affecting emigration of physicians from Sub-Saharan countries and the effects of this medical brain drain on life expectancy and number of deaths due to AIDS. Data are compiled on emigrating African physicians from 16 receiving Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) coun...

While economic sanctions are successful in achieving political goals, can hurt the civilian population. These negative effects could be even more detrimental and long-lasting for future generations. This study estimates of on children’s education by exploiting United Nations imposed Iran 2006. Using variation strength across industries difference-in-differences with synthetic control analyses, ...

Transport infrastructure has represented one of the cornerstones of development and cohesion strategies in the European Union (EU) and elsewhere in the world. However, despite the considerable funds devoted to it, its impact remains controversial. This paper revisits the question of to what extent transport infrastructure endowment – proxied by regional motorways – has contributed to regional g...

I N the last decade, the application of gravity models enjoyed a big revival. This was not so much driven by its more rigorous theoretical foundation (Anderson, 1979; Bergstrand, 1985, 1989 and 1990; Helpman and Krugman, 1985; and Helpman, 1987, etc.) but by the opportunity to project bilateral trade relations (see Wang and Winters, 1991; Hamilton and Winters, 1992; Baldwin, 1994; and successor...

abstract: decentralization is a process in which local affairs are administrated by local authorities outside of activities of the central government. today, decentralization policy is considered as one of the ways that most countries adopted to improve public sector performance. in this paper using geometric analysis, innovation that this paper represents, an econometric model is considered to...

The scarcity of water resources and supply resources limitation, have caused an increasing gap between water supply and demand specially in recent decades in almost all regions of the globe. One of the best known solutions proposed by the economists is using the different water pricing approaches thereby obtaining the optimal allocation and social justice. To this purpose, this paper uses the p...

Meta-analysis is a standard statistical method used to combine the conclusions of individual studies that are related and the results of single study alone can not answered to deal with issues. The data are summarized by one or more outcome measure estimates along with their standard errors. The multivariate model and the variations between studies are not considered in most articles. Here we d...