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The issue of whether the public sector enhances or retards long-run economic growth has been debated passionately in recent years. We use meta-analysis to shed light on the issue. A sample of 93 published studies, yielding 123 meta-observations, is used to examine the robustness of the evidence regarding the effect of fiscal policy on growth. Five fiscal policy areas are considered: general government consumption, tax rates, education expenditure, defence, and public infrastructure. Several meta-analytical techniques are applied, including descriptive statistics, contingency table analysis and rough set analysis. On balance, the evidence for a positive effect of conventional fiscal policy on growth is rather weak, but the commonly identified importance of education and infrastructure is confirmed. The results are sensitive to several research design parameters, such as the type of data, model specification and econometric technique. The top two tiers of journals appear less supportive of the conventional priors with respect to government and growth than lesser-ranked journals. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The number of immigrants across the world has doubled since 1980. The estimates of the impact of immigration on wages and employment in host countries are quantitatively small but vary widely. We summarize previous meta-analyses of the empirical literature and consider the implications for policy. We conclude that, on average, the impact on employment of the native born is smaller than on wages, while impacts are generally smaller in the US than in other countries studied to date. The variation in the estimates is related to the definition of the labour market, the extent of substitutability of foreign and native workers, and controls for endogeneity of immigrant settlement in statistical modelling. Policies enhancing labour-market flexibility, while at the same time improving immigrant economic integration, are likely to be effective in reducing transitory negative impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We compare a set of econometric studies that measure the effect of net internal migration in neoclassical models of long-run real income convergence and derive 67 comparable effect sizes. The precision-weighted estimate of beta convergence is about 2.7 per cent. An increase of one percentage point in the net migration rate of a region increases the per capita income growth rate in that region on average by about 0.1 percentage points. Introducing a net migration variable in a growth regression increases the estimate of beta convergence slightly. Studies that use panel models or IV estimation methods yield smaller coefficients of net migration in growth regressions, while the opposite holds for regressions controlling for high-skilled migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]