True. In low-income countries, openness to international trade is indispensable for rapid economic growth. Indeed, few developing nations have grown rapidly over time without simultaneous increases in both exports and imports, and virtually all developing countries that have grown rapidly have done so under open trade policies or declining trade protection. India and China are the best recent e...

We examine the determinants of financial development in Asia and the Pacific from 1995 to 2011. To do so, we apply the dynamic generalized method of moments to a panel data set of 26 economies in the region. We find that better governance and institutional quality foster financial development in developing economies while economic growth and trade openness are key determinants of financial dept...

Cross-country growth regressions have become an increasingly common tool in empirical development research. But these regressions typically do not attempt to distinguish among countries in different stages of development. Two empirical methods are used to test for such differences. Several of the factors known to affect economic growth are shown to operate differently for countries in different...

The effects of capital account openness on economic growth may vary across countries. Some countries may not have in place the constellation of institutions required to fully benefit from open capital accounts. Other countries may realize only small marginal improvements in the wake of capital account liberalization. This paper presents evidence of an inverted-U shaped relationship between the ...

The paper empirically examines the relationship between trade openness and the level of corruption in Pakistan using annual time-series data for the period 1984 to 2007. The analysis shows that trade openness negatively affects corruption in Pakistan. The results are robust to controlling for other corruption determining variables and various model specifications. Sensitivity analysis shows tha...

In a panel framework that includes 18 countries, this paper studies the short and long run effect of financial development on economic growth and the determinants of financial development in Latin America. Financial development shows a positive effect on economic growth in the long run, but a negative effect in the short run for the full sample. When the sample is divided by income levels, this...

Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for non-commercial purposes by any means, provided that this copyright notice appears on all such copies. Examining the effects of trade liberalization on agricultural sector is an interesting empirical question. This paper provides a quantitative assessment of the trade policy impacts on agricultural sector growth in Sri Lanka based on the nati...

Frankel and Romer [Frankel, J., Romer, D., 1999. Does trade cause growth? American Economic Review 89 (3), 379-399] documented positive effects of geographically determined trade openness on economic growth. At the same time, critics fear that openness can lead to a "race to the bottom" that increases pollution and reduces government resources for investments in health and education. We use Fra...