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This paper shows evidence of strong heterogeneity in the relationship between government size and growth, depending on the quality of public sector institutions. Focusing on a wide sample of developed and developing countries over the period 1981-2005, we find that government size reduces growth when bureaucracy quality is low, whereas no significant effect is observed for sufficiently high levels of bureaucracy quality. The results hold both in cross-section and panel data analyses and are robust to a large number of robustness checks. These findings have important implications for assessing the role of government size in economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutional quality has been increasingly identified as crucial for economic development. In line with previous work which has explored the determinants of good institutions, this paper examines the impact of economic and social inequalities between ethnic groups on government quality. I hypothesize that greater inequalities between groups will tend to undermine institutions both because they tend to legitimize corruption in the eyes of disadvantaged groups and because of the efforts of better-off groups to maintain their privileges. Based on a panel of 29 developing countries, I find that socio-economic ethnic group inequalities reduce government quality, something which suggests the convenience of policies that can level the playing field in ethnically heterogeneous societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to study the structure of production in some underdeveloped economies. Recent literature on the problem of economic development has greatly emphasized the role of linkages in the planning of economic development. ALBERT HIRSCHMAN, for example, has advocated a policy of investing in the strategic sectors (those with strong backward and forward linkages) of an economy, which in interacting with the other sectors can help to initiate economic development. An autonomous investment can induce further investments through pressures of excess demand. This is the backward linkage effect -- output of the induced industries are the inputs of the autonomous industry. An autonomous investment can also induce further investment by providing an excess supply of its produce. This is the forward linkage -- the output of the autonomous industry is the input of the induced industries[1]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]