Hong Kong and Macau were re-united with China in the late 1990s as two special administrative regions (SARs). Over the last half century, they were China’s good examples of economic development, windows of openness and investors. Due to historical reasons, China lagged far behind Hong Kong and Macau in terms of per capita incomes. However, rapid economic growth in China over the last three deca...

The regional and provincial divergence in China’s economic growth has attracted extensive and intensive attention, yet the measurement and research on the sources of the divergence is relatively inadequate. Why there is divergence across provinces? What elements have contributed to the divergence and how? Based on growth regression analysis and “counterfactual econometrics”, this paper construc...

This paper finds that age distribution, educational attainment, and government size converge across the US states at rates rather similar to the convergence rate for per capita income. The main part of the paper takes age distribution variables as exogenous in conditional convergence regressions. Using panel data, the estimated partial relation between age and the subsequent growth rate of per ...

Abstract In this paper, income per capita convergence hypothesis is tested in selected OIC countries. For this purpose, we use the time series model and univariate KPSS stationary test with multiple structural breaks (Carrion-i-Silvestre et al. (2005)) over the period 1950-2008. The results show that most OIC countries could not catch up toward USA. Although because of some positive term of tra...

We propose an economic theory of infectious disease transmission and rational behavior. Diseases are costly due to mortality (premature death) and morbidity (lower productivity and quality of life). The theory offers three main insights. First, higher disease prevalence implies lower saving-investment propensity. Preventive behavior can partially offset this when the prevalence rate and negativ...