We investigate the role of initial conditions at colonial independence on economic growth in Africa in the post-independence period using Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA). A key innovation in our estimation methodology is that we incorporate parameter heterogeneity in model averaging as well as try to mitigate the endogeneity problem present in growth regressions. In order to ensure that differen...

A large amount of recent evidence finds a negative relationship between local unemployment and wages in OECD countries, a relationship christened a ‘wage curve’. This contradicts the conventional model of the labour market in which high unemployment regions have higher wages to compensate for search and other costs. This paper discovers a wage curve in South Africa, a country with several times...

The OECD’s report on income inequality, Divided We Stand (2011), documented that the gap between rich and poor in OECD countries had widened continuously over the three decades to 2008, reaching an all-time high. New OECD data show that the global economic crisis has squeezed incomes from work and capital in most countries. Excluding the mitigating effects of the welfare state, via taxes and tr...

The aim of this paper is to empirically highlight some important worldwide differences in the impact of privatization of the fixed-line telecommunications operator on network expansion, tariffs, and efficiency during the 1985-2007 period for a large panel of countries. The countries considered are first regrouped into OECD and non-OECD countries. Then, the non-OECD countries are classified into...

abstract achieving economic growth, as one of the essential purposes in each country, needs appropriate tracing of government as one of the important and effective sections in that economy. nowadays, unlike the 80s, economists concentrate on objectives such as explanation of the relationship between size of the government and economic growth and delineation of optimum size of the government whi...

Recent scholarship has claimed that countries across Latin America have been adopting an increasingly liberal and more advanced legal framework for the protection of refugees. Yet little systematic cross-country evidence beyond case studies exists to back up this claim. To address gap in literature, I develop a new methodology — called Asylum Policies (APLA) Database measure policy outputs on a...