This paper reviews and appraises the body of empirical research on the association between financial markets and economic growth that has accumulated over the past quarter-century. The bulk of the historical evidence suggests that financial development affects economic growth in a positive, monotonic way, yet recent research endeavors have provided useful and important qualifications of this co...

Countries face the twin challenge of providing highquality care while keeping care systems affordable and accessible during a time of financial crisis and low economic growth. In many countries, payment reforms are seen as a major lever to achieve these challenges. The rationale behind payment reforms emerges from the recognition that the current funding systems are a key cause of care fragment...

This paper studies the influence of bank market concentration, regulation, and institutions on the real effects of 68 systemic banking crises in 54 countries over the 1980-2000 period. We find that less stringent restrictions on non-traditional bank activities and on the mixing of banking and commerce have a negative effect on economic growth during normal periods but mitigate the negative effe...

Sustainable development -the notion that boosting economic growth, protecting natural resources, and ensuring social justice can be complementary goals -has lost much appeal over the past two decades, the victim of woolly thinking and interest-group politics. The concept can be relevant again, but only if its original purpose -helping the poor live healthier lives on their own terms -is restored.

  There is a significant relationship between economic growth and the degree of urban concentration, as measured by primacy or the share of the largest city in an urban system. In accordance to urban economic theories, there is an inverse-U shape relationship between urban concentration –urban primacy- and economic growth. That is, as economy grows, urban concentration increases, approaches a...

This paper uses two classes of multidimensional indices to measure countries’ evolution towards the achievement of United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Our results suggest that improvements in the different MDGs tend to be uncorrelated among them and, on average, countries are largely offtrack in their way towards MDGs achievement. This evolution has been highly uneven across co...

It is well known that some XML elements correspond to objects (in the sense of object-orientation) and others do not. The question we consider in this paper is what benefits we can derive from paying attention to such object semantics, particularly for the problem of keyword queries. Keyword queries against XML data have been studied extensively in recent years, with several lowest-common-ances...