All industrialized countries experienced a transition from high birth rates and stagnant standards of living to low birth rates and sustained growth in per capita income. What contributed to these transformations? Did economic and demographic changes transpire through common or distinct channels? We construct a general equilibrium model with endogenous fertility in order to quantitatively inves...

OBJECTIVE To estimate the national trend in per capita consumption (PCC) of alcohol for Australians aged 15 years and older for the financial years 1990-91 to 2008-09. DESIGN AND SETTING With the use of data obtained from Australian Bureau of Statistics' catalogues and World Advertising Research Centre reports, three alternative series of annual totals of PCC of alcohol for the past 20 years ...

Recent studies on economic growth focuses on persistent inequality across countries. In this paper we study mechanisms that may give rise to such a persistent inequality. We consider countries that accumulate capital in order to increase the per capita income in the long run. We show that the long-run growth dynamics of those countries can generate a twin-peak distribution of per capita income....

This paper provides a specific application of the Environmental Kuznets curve is a hypothetical relationship between various indicators of environmental degradation and income per capita. In the early stages of economic growth degradation and pollution increases, but beyond some level of income per capita it tends to reverse, so that at high economic growth leads to environmental improvement. T...

This paper demonstrates that institutional factors influence the subjective well-being of individuals differently in rich versus poor countries. A lower level of corruption, a more democratic government and better civil rights increase the well-being of individuals in rich countries, whereas an increase in per capita income has no impact. On the contrary, in poor countries the extent of corrupt...

This paper re-examines the Dollar and Kraay (2002) result that per capita real income for the poorest quintile in a country grows equiproportionately with the rest of the economy. Results obtained here using the Dollar and Kraay data set indicate that the real per capita income of the poor rises less than proportionately when growth is positive and falls dramatically when growth is negative. Th...

The tropics, sadly, continues to be a belt of poverty. The countries of the tropics all have low or middling incomes, with a few tiny or natural-resource-rich exceptions, and few of the poorest countries are outside of the tropics. The causes of tropical poverty are surely complex, involving initial endowments (Diamond), history, especially colonization, and geographical isolation (Gallup and S...

nomic development and growth has long been understood—emphasized, for example, in the writings of Adam Smith and, more recently, David Landes (1998), and recognized in the 1993 Nobel Prize awarded to Douglass North. In the past few years, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in this subject, including research into the sources of institutional differences across countries, the chann...

Low income economies are characterized with high investment returns and therefore should attract foreign investment to primarily fill the existing gaps of productive factors which vividly reveals the basis for their underdeveloped status. The main objective of the study is to ascertain the impact of flow of FDI on the economic development of the host African countries characterized with low inc...