Empirical results through a fixed effects regression model show that government size has a negative effect on growth mainly through hampering capital accumulation. When a sample is divided into OECD and non-OECD countries, the negative effect of government size on capital accumulation persists for non-OECD countries but not for OECD countries.

A question fundamental to sustainable economic growth is whether a poor region tends to grow faster than a rich one, such that the poor region catches up with the rich region in terms of the level of per capita income. In this article, we apply the spatial panel data approach to the analysis of regional income convergence across 177 economic areas in the contiguous US states over the period fro...

In this paper, we use a newly available panel data set that constitutes a representative sample of rural India over the period 1971-1999 to examine the role of economic change as a source of fertility decline. We first develop a simple dynamic model of fertility choice that incorporates the possibility of cost-of-time effects, a quantity-quality tradeoff, and increased access to health and fami...

There is controversy between Putnam and Olson concerning the role of group. Putnam argued that small group makes a contribution to economic growth whereas Olson asserted that small group hampers the economic growth through rent-seeking behavior. Since the end of the 1990s in Japan, there has been a remarkable rise in the rate of enactment of public information-disclosure ordinances by local gov...

Facing widespread poverty and land degradation, Vietnam started a land reform in 1993 as part of its renovation policy package known as “Doi Moi”. This paper examines the impacts of improved land tenure security, via this land reform, on manure use by farm households. As manure potentially improves soil fertility by adding organic matter and nutrients to the soil surface, it might contribute to...

Using panel data for 24 (OECD) countries during the period 1980–2004 this study examines how social trust affects fertility. The major finding through the random effects approach is that the social trust increases the fertility rate. A 1% rise in the trust rate leads to an increase in fertility by 0.01 points. The results presented here suggest that in developed countries, trust underlies the d...

In this paper I analyse the role of openness and globalisation in Latin America’s economic development. The paper is divided into two distinct parts: I first (Sections 2 to 4) provide an analysis of 60 years of the region’s economic history, that go from the launching of the Alliance for Progress by the Kennedy administration in 1961, to the formulation and implementation of the market oriented...

In cross-national data on individual and country-level characteristics, the variance of log annual income is shown to correlate positively with indicators of redistribution. The database comes from the Panel Comparability (PACO) project, affiliated with the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), a first effort to provide comparable panel data across a broad range of countries. Countries in the sample i...

The relationship between development and gender empowerment remains unclear, especially in low-income societies where economic growth has not brought about any noticeable change in gender relations. We argue that this is largely due to the multidimensional nature of both concepts so that different aspects of development may have quite different relationships with different aspects of empowermen...

We propose and investigate a new channel through which the resource curse a stylized fact that countries rich in natural resources grow slower operates. Predatory governments are more likely to expropriate corporate profits in natural resource industries when the price of resources is higher. Corporations whose profits are more dependent on the price of resources can mitigate the risk of exprop...