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Academic freedom is under threat across the globe and a wave of substantial academic freedom declines affects not only autocracies but also (liberal) democracies. However, although the development of academic freedom has generated scholarly attention, this article presents the first systematic conceptualization and measurement of academic freedom growth and decline episodes. In particular, this article systematically analyzes the development of academic freedom across the globe and shows that global development follows waves of growth and decline. The first growth wave started in the mid-1940s and was succeeded by a second growth wave that started around 1977 and lasted for more than 30 years resulting in the greatest improvement in academic freedom that has been recorded since 1900. However, since 2013, we see an ongoing decline wave in academic freedom. Overall, this article highlights how academic freedom developed over time and across the globe in waves of growth and decline. (HRK / Abstract übernommen).

Unlike most cross country growth analyses, we focus on turning points in growth performance. We look for instances of rapid acceleration in economic growth that are sustained for at least 8 years and identify more than 80 such episodes since the 1950s. Growth accelerations tend to be correlated with increases in investment and trade, and with real exchange rate depreciations. Politicalregime changes are statistically significant predictors of growth accelerations. External shocks tend to produce growth accelerations that eventually fizzle out, while economic reform is a statistically significant predictor of growth accelerations that are sustained. However, growth accelerations tend to be highly unpredictable: the vast majority of growth accelerations are unrelated to standard determinants and most instances of economic reform do not produce growth accelerations.

In this paper, we argue that a better understanding of the relationship between inequality and economic growth can be obtained by shifting the analysis from the space of final achievements to the space of opportunities. To this end, we introduce a formal framework based on the concept of the Opportunity Growth Incidence Curve. This framework can be used to evaluate the income dynamics of specific groups of the population and to infer the role of growth in the evolution of inequality of opportunity over time. We show the relevance of the introduced framework by providing two empirical analyses, one for Italy and the other for Brazil. These analyses show the distributional impact of the recent growth experienced by Brazil and the recent crisis suffered by Italy from both the income inequality and opportunity inequality perspectives.

MENA is one of the richest regions in the world in terms of natural resources: it holds more than 60 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves, mostly located in the Gulf region, and nearly half of gas reserves. Oil represents 80-85 percent of merchandise exports in the region, making it highly depending on fluctuations in international prices. A long strand of economic literature has suggested that such dependence may hurt a country’s growth prospects and the scope for job creation by reducing economic diversification. This volume investigates the effect of natural resources and the role of policies on achieving higher and sustained growth through diversification away from oil. It explores analytical questions which include: (i) the impact of the real exchange rate on manufacturing and tradable services competitiveness in MENA; (ii) the role of fiscal policy in supporting diversification; (iii) how “weak links” (input sectors with low productivity) play a critical role in explaining the concentration of economic activities, in addition to the classical Dutch Disease effect and (iv) the impact of macroeconomic factors on the drive for regional integration Several policy recommendations emerge from this analysis: (i) policymakers should strive to avoid real exchange rate overvaluation through consistent fiscal policies, flexible exchange rates and adequate product and factor market regulations; (ii) reforms to improve the competition and efficiency of upstream input activities are crucial for improving the performance of downstream activities and diversification in MENA (iii) a consistent and transparent fiscal policy is essential to reduce instability, build the fiscal space needed to invest in core infrastructure and human capital and create a favorable environment for diversification; (iv) while regional trade integration is desirable for political, social, cultural and economic reasons, in terms of trade liberalization, this is not the best option for resource-rich countries of the region. Policymakers should take this into account in discussing regional integration options. It is hoped that the findings of this work will be of interest to policymakers, the civil society, donors and practitioners in MENA countries and stimulate the debate of such an important topic.

There has been a considerable amount of research into the growth of the Pacific island countries; however, there has been no attempt to identify episodes of growth (and non-growth) and to identify and understand the factors behind these episodes. This narrative article examines the growth experiences of the eight small and micro states of the North and South Pacific that are members of the World Bank. The experience of Samoa and Vanuatu supports the idea that economic reform can lead to growth spurts. Overall, the narratives suggest that unless aid leads to changes in institutions and policies, it does not have long-lasting positive growth impacts. As experience in the Federated States of Micronesia and the Republic of the Marshall Islands appears to show, substantial aid may raise Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth for short periods, but may well have very adverse impacts over the long run.

This book examines Africa's recent growth in the context of its long history of growth accelerations and collapses and seeks to answer several questions-Is Africa indeed at a turning point? Have African countries learned from past policy and institutional mistakes? And are the economic fundamentals finally pointing towards more sustainable growth?.

The Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics (ABCDE) brings together the world’s leading scholars and development practitioners for a lively debate on state-of-the-art thinking in development policy and the implications for the global economy. The 17th conference was held in Dakar, Senegal, on January 27, 2005. The theme of the conference was growth and integration, which was divided into five topics: growth and integration, financial reforms, economic development, trade and development, and investment climate.

To address these broad questions: How to analyze the impact of globalization? What is the effect of rich countries' policies on developing ones? How to redefine the development agenda and scale-up the aid effort? The European Conference on Development Economics (ABCDE-Europe) focused on some of the problematic features of globalization and discussed the global impact of developed countries' policies in a number of crucial areas for developing countries, such as farm trade, migrations, the protection of intellectual property, and capital flows. It also highlighted the role and responsibilities of the private sector. This volume, organized in twelve chapters, opens with the five plenary session papers that were at the core of the discussion and focuses on five crucial issues and policy challenges: agricultural trade, migration flows, intellectual property rights, the costs and benefits of international capital flows, and options for sovereign debt restructuring. The seven remaining chapters offer a collection of selected papers discussed in the parallel workshops held during the conference. They cover a wider range of issues, from the role and responsibilities of private actors and the components of the business environment, to the sources of development finance and the relationship between commodity resources and development, to the issue of scaling up, and the possibility of intensifying the volume and impact of development aid.

Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Economic Growth compellingly shows how technical innovation, stimulated by the country's institutions, has radically improved the living standards of the citizens of the US. We conduct an empirical investigation of the impact of the capacity of the US state, as proxied by the presence of post offices, on innovation. We show that there is a strong association between the number of post offices in a county and patenting activity. Our evidence suggests that part of story of US innovation is the capacity and reach of the US state.

After the Global Financial Crisis, a controversial rush to fiscal austerity followed in many countries. Yet research on the effects of austerity on macroeconomic aggregates was and still is unsettled, mired by the difficulty of identifying multipliers from observational data. This article, reconciles seemingly disparate estimates of multipliers within a unified and state-contingent framework. We achieve identification of causal effects with new propensity-score based methods for time series data. Using this novel approach, we show that austerity is always a drag on growth, and especially so in depressed economies: a 1% of GDP fiscal consolidation translates into a loss of 3.5% of real GDP over five years when implemented in a slump, rather than just 1.8% in a boom.