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The African Growth Opportunity Act (AGOA) has been a crucial trade and development initiative, offering preferential access to qualified Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries to the United States market since its enactment in 2000. This paper presents a comprehensive review of scholarly articles and policy reports that analyze the impact of AGOA on the economic performance of SSA countries. Employing various econometric methods and data analysis techniques, researchers have investigated the effects of AGOA on trade flows, foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows, employment, economic growth, and poverty levels. The findings reveal that AGOA has positively affected the region's trade, particularly in apparel, textiles, and agriculture. However, its influence on promoting export diversification and attracting FDI is nuanced, with substantial heterogeneity among the beneficiary countries and industries within each country. While some SSA countries have experienced substantial export growth and FDI inflows, others have not fully leveraged the benefits of AGOA due to absorptive capacity constraints and governance challenges. AGOA's effectiveness in promoting broad-based employment, GDP growth, and poverty reduction remains an active area of inquiry, necessitating further research to understand the policy's sustained impact and inform future trade policy designs for SSA countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) was designed to reveal the economic, social, and environmental trade-offs associated with conventional economic growth as traditionally measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Although originally designed for use at the national scale, an interest has developed in the United States in a state-level uptake of the GPI to inform and guide policy. This study presents the first fifty-state estimate for U.S. GPI in order to address questions over its design, implementation, and ultimate potential as a tool to guide state-level economic policy. Following a review of the current state of analysis and critique of GPI, we provide an overview of methodology and database development. Results are then presented, including discussion of lessons learned through a fifty-state application. The paper concludes with suggestions for further research and next steps to consolidating a consistent methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A semi-empirical endogenous growth theory was proposed by the authors in 2005. It is based on a model of the economy as a two-stage materials/energy processing system. Growth is simulated by a two-parameter production function with two traditional factors, labor and capital, and a non-traditional factor, namely ‘useful work’. The non-traditional factor is calculated from primary energy inputs multiplied by an empirically estimated average energy conversion efficiency, which is a function of changing technology over time. This model ‘explains’ past US growth from 1900 through 1973–74 with satisfactory accuracy but it slightly underestimates subsequent growth (i.e. it leaves a small unexplained but increasing residual) for the period after 1975. However, by subdividing capital stock into traditional and ICT components, we are able to extend the theory to explain US economic growth accurately. In this paper we also extend the results to Japan. The revised production function has only three independent parameters. The new model also has implications for future economic growth, energy and environmental policy that differ significantly from the traditional growth theory. These implications are discussed briefly. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper presents evidence of a non-linear relationship between real GDP growth and oil price changes for the US economy. We also argue that this non-linearity is not merely due to the use of data from the mid-1980s onwards, as most authors, so far, seem to believe. In fact, we find the existence of non-linearity with the use of data earlier than 1984, and even before 1977. Furthermore, we question that the non-linear transformations of oil prices proposed in the literature are the most appropriate ones for reflecting such non-linearity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]