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Copyright of International Economics / Economia Internazionale is the property of Camera di Commercio di Genova and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Using 641 principles of economics students across four universities, the authors examine whether providing monetary incentives in a prisoner's dilemma game enhances student learning as measured by a set of common exam questions. Subjects either play a two-player prisoner's dilemma game for real money, play the same game with no money at stake (i.e., play a hypothetical version), or are in a control group where no game is played. The authors find strong evidence that students who played the classroom game for real money earned higher test scores than students who played the hypothetical game or where no game was played. Their findings challenge the conventional wisdom that monetary incentives are unnecessary in classroom experiments.

Copyright of International Economics / Economia Internazionale is the property of Camera di Commercio di Genova and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper examines changes in economic growth that are likely to result from changes in trade policies, exports, and investment in 12 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. Using a vector error correction model (VECM), our results indicate that trade policies, exports, and investment rate shocks have a significant impact on economic growth in 10 of the 12 SSA countries. This suggests that it is possible to stimulate economic growth in some African countries through an outward-looking strategy of export expansion. More significantly, the results further suggest the importance as well as the need for African countries to embark on trade liberalization policies in order to enhance economic growth in the current world economy. Key words - trade policies, exports, investment, economic growth, sub-Saharan Africa, vector error correction

Copyright of International Economics / Economia Internazionale is the property of Camera di Commercio di Genova and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper postulates that highly educated leaders matter in economic growth and development and that this is one of the fundamental causes of the differences in income between countries. To verify this assertion, we examine Central African Republic and Singapore within the neoclassical growth model that incorporates educational attainments of leaders as the functionally relevant explanatory variable. We found the mean years of schooling of educated leaders to be statistically and significantly different in both countries, but more importantly, educational attainments of leaders have a positive and statistically significant effect on economic growth in Singapore, but negative in Central African Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Economics / Economia Internazionale is the property of Camera di Commercio di Genova and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines the causal relationship between tax revenues and government expenditures in twenty-two OECD countries, eleven European Union (EU) member states, and eleven non-EU. We use the Autorgressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds test and the Toda-Yamamoto Granger noncausality approach to test for causality. The results show that the long-run and short-run causal patterns differ across these groups within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). For the long-run causal patterns, we find evidence to confirm the tax-and-spend hypothesis in eight of the twenty-two countries; but the evidence is more prevalent within the EU countries, where tax burdens are much higher, than in the non-EU OECD countries. In addition, the long-run causality results also confirm the institutional separation hypothesis in twelve countries, with two-thirds coming from the non-EU OECD countries. While we have no evidence to support the fiscal synchronization hypothesis in the long run, the short-run results show evidence of fiscal synchronization in five out of twenty-two countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the choice of monetary targets in Nigeria since the introduction of the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) in 1986. We employed cointegration vector error correction methodology using quarterly in order to ascertain if M2 targeting over M1 targeting was a prudent monetary policy rule. We tested for the stability of real M1 and real M2 money demand functions and found the former to be an unstable during the SAP period. Both the CUSUM and CUSUMSQ tests confirmed the stability of the short- and long run parameters of the real M2 money demand function but not for real M1. The stability of the real M2 money demand function supports its choice as an intermediate target. Furthermore, we found that the actual real M2 monetary growth deviated from the annual target rates, which indicated that the Central Bank of Nigeria did not strongly commit to its annual M2 money growth targets. Further tests showed that the deviations of actual real M2 growth from the annual target growth rates affected real GDP growth and inflation rate adversely during the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]