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We examine the record of cross-country growth over the past fifty years and ask if developing countries have made progress on closing the income gap between their per capita incomes and those in the advanced economies. We conclude that, as a group, they have not and then survey the literature on absolute convergence with particular emphasis on that from the last decade or so. That literature supports our conclusion of a lack of progress in closing the income gap between countries. We close with a brief examination of the recent literature on cross-individual distribution of income, which finds that despite the lack of progress on cross country convergence, global inequality has tended to fall since 2000.

Financial crashes were followed by deep recessions in the Sudden Stops of emerging economies. An equilibrium business cycle model with a collateral constraint explains this phenomenon as a result of the amplification and asymmetry that the constraint induces in the responses of macro-aggregates to shocks. Leverage rises during expansions, and when it rises enough it triggers the constraint, causing a Fisherian deflation that reduces credit and the price and quantity of collateral assets. Output and factor allocations fall because access to working capital financing is also reduced. Precautionary saving makes Sudden Stops low probability events nested within normal cycles, as observed in the data.

We construct a matrix showing the share of the year 2000 population in every country that is descended from people in different source countries in the year 1500. Using the matrix to adjust indicators of early development so that they reflect the history of a population's ancestors rather than the history of the place they live today greatly improves the ability of those indicators to predict current GDP. The variance of the early development history of a country's inhabitants is a good predictor for current inequality, with ethnic groups originating in regions having longer histories of organized states tending to be at the upper end of a country's income distribution.

Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) research has grown in importance in today's highly volatile and interconnected economy. This work investigates the relationship between EPU and Financial Stability (FS) (i.e., Z-scores and non-performing loans (NPL)) with the mediating variable of governance quality through a 23-country panel data from 2005 to 2019. The System Generalized Method of Moment (SYS-GMM) is adopted to address the issue of endogeneity, which is common in panel data regression. The two-stage Sequential of the Linear Panel Data Model (SELPDM) was also used to test the robustness of the results. According to the findings, EPU has a significant negative effect on financial stability (measured by the Z-score) and a significant positive effect on financial stability in the banking industry of most developed economies (proxied by NPL). We also discovered that good governance can be used to mitigate the negative effects of EPU on financial stability; however, this influence varies depending on region, bank, and market structure, and it was significantly greater during the global financial crisis. Finally, this study can help financial managers and policymakers develop appropriate policies to understand how banks respond to EPU.

We develop a statistical framework to use satellite data on night lights to augment official income growth measures. For countries with poor national income accounts, the optimal estimate of growth is a composite with roughly equal weights on conventionally measured growth and growth predicted from lights. Our estimates differ from official data by up to three percentage points annually. Using lights, empirical analyses of growth need no longer use countries as the unit of analysis; we can measure growth for sub- and supranational regions. We show, for example, that coastal areas in sub-Saharan Africa are growing slower than the hinterland.

This paper examines some of the recent literature on the estimation of production functions. We focus on techniques suggested in two recent papers, Olley and Pakes (1996) and Levinsohn and Petrin (2003). While there are some solid and intuitive identification ideas in these papers, we argue that the techniques can suffer from functional dependence problems. We suggest an alternative approach that is based on the ideas in these papers, but does not suffer from the functional dependence problems and produces consistent estimates under alternative data generating processes for which the original procedures do not.

This study is to examine how FDI and green economic growth are related in Southeast Asian economies. It also attempts to find out the role of fiscal policy development in the relationship between FDI and green growth in the economies of the region. For this purpose, a dynamic panel threshold model is used for the data over the period 2000–2018. The main results show that FDI has a positive impact on the progress of green growth in these economies, with a stronger impact in the group of Southeast Asian economies with high fiscal development. This result confirms the pollution halo hypothesis, which states that FDI can promote green growth in a country. Aligning economic priorities to improve green fiscal policies, reforming fiscal integration programs, planning for green job creation, and implementing policies to attract FDI are recommended as important policy implications over the COVID-19 period.

Motivated by the prevalence of economic targets at all levels of territory administration in China, this article proposes a Tullock contest model to study optimal target setting in a multi-layered tournament-based organisation. In our model, targets are used by upper-level officials to convey the importance of economic growth and incentivise subordinates in the tournaments. Our model predicts a top-down amplification of economic growth targets along the jurisdiction levels, which explains the observed pattern in China. Using both provincial and prefectural-level data, we test the model predictions and find consistent evidence.

Chinese housing prices rose by over 10 percent per year in real terms between 2003 and 2014 and are now between two and ten times higher than the construction cost of apartments. At the same time, Chinese developers built 100 billion square feet of residential real estate. This boom has been accompanied by a large increase in the number of vacant homes, held by both developers and households. This boom may turn out to be a housing bubble followed by a crash, yet that future is far from certain. The demand for real estate in China is so strong that current prices might be sustainable, especially given the sparse alternative investments for Chinese households, so long as the level of new supply is radically curtailed. Whether that happens depends on the policies of the Chinese government, which must weigh the benefits of price stability against the costs of restricting urban growth.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the potential determinants of FDI, in developed and developing countries. Design/methodology/approach This paper investigates FDI determinants based on panel data analysis using static and dynamic modeling for 20 countries (11 developed and 9 developing), over the period 2004-2013. For static model estimations, Hausman (1978) test indicates the applicability of fixed effect/random effect, while generalized moments of methods (GMM) (dynamic model) is used to capture endogeneity and unobserved heterogeneity. Findings The outcome across different countries depicts diverse results. In developed countries, FDI seeks policy-related determinants (GDP growth, trade openness, and freedom index), and in developing country FDI showed positive association for economic determinants (gross fixed capital formulation (GFCF), trade openness, and efficiency variables). Research limitations/implications The destination of FDI is limited to 20 countries in the present paper. The indicator of the institutional environment, namely economic freedom index, used in this paper has received some criticism in calculations. Practical implications The paper enlists recommendations for future FDI policies and may assist government in providing a tactical framework for skill development, thereby increasing manufacturing growth rate. The paper also throws light on vertical and horizontal capital inflows considering resource, strategy, and market-seeking FDI. Social implications FDI may bring significant benefits by creating high-quality jobs, introducing modern production and management practices. It highlights how multinational corporations and government contribute to better working conditions in host countries. Originality/value The paper uncovers important features like macroeconomic variables, especially country-wise efficiency scores, policy variables, GFCF, and freedom index, for determining FDI inflows in 20 countries using panel data methods and provides a roadmap for developed and developing countries. The study highlights endogeneity and unobserved heteroscedasticity by applying GMM one- and two-step procedure.