In the extensive empirical literature on aid effectiveness, aid is always measured as a share of GDP. However, measuring aid in real dollars per capita is also consistent with standard growth theory. We show that the choice ...

We extend the literature on the deep determinants of economic development by focusing on life expectancy, instead of income per capita, as an indicator of economic development, and by examining the role of informal, as ...

This paper reports on a small-scale study of the compliance costs of small New Zealand businesses. Participating firms were asked to keep a record of both time spent and expenditure directly incurred over a thirteen-week ...

All of the recent empirical work on the relationship between income inequality and economic growth has used inequality data that are not consistently measured. This paper argues that this is inappropriate and shows that ...

Using cross-country data from a sample of low, middle and high-income countries, the paper explores the empirical relationships between national measures of social capital (civic and public), social divergence and social ...

In this paper we use experimental data collected in rural Cameroon to quantify the effect of social distance on trust and altruism. Our measure of social distance is one that is relevant to everyday economic interactions: ...

This paper explores the issue of whether countries with high levels of social capital give more foreign aid than others. It is often argued that in countries with high levels of social capital (as measured, for example, ...

With Erkin Bairam’s untimely death on 21 May 2001 at the age of 43, New Zealand lost one its most distinguished and prolific applied economists. Born in Nicosia, Cyprus, most of Bairam’s working life was spent in the ...

Broadly speaking, economic experiments and surveys have found trust to be much lower in Africa than in industrialized countries. We analyze new experimental and survey results from rural Cameroon, where the average level ...