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In an overlapping-generations model that represents a small open economy, where agents live two periods, liquidity constraints lead to low economic development when the only accumulable factor is human capital.

A basic neoclassical model of production is often used to assess the contribution of investment to output growth. In the model, investment raises the capital stock and output growth increases in proportion to the growth in capital.

The authors examine the investment behaviour of a sample of small, credit-constrained firms in Sri Lanka. Using a unique panel-data set, they analyze and compare the activities of two groups of small firms distinguished by their different access to financing; one group consists of firms with heavily subsidized loans from the World Bank, and the other consists of firms without such subsidies.

Microfinance institutions now serve over 10 million poor households in the developing and developed world, and much of their success has been attributed to their innovative use of peer group lending. There is very little empirical evidence, however, to suggest that group lending schemes offer a superior institutional design over lending programs that serve individual borrowers.

It has been well documented that the education premium measured by the wage difference between university and high school graduates has remained constant over the past two decades in Canada. Despite this stable pattern at the aggregate level, skill-biased technology could have important implications for the inter-industry wage structure.

There is a large body of literature that studies the relationship between financial structure (that is, the degree to which the financial system is either market- or intermediary-based) and long-run economic growth.

Previous studies on whether the nature of the exchange rate regime influences a country's medium-term growth performance have been based on a tripartite classification scheme that distinguishes between pegged, intermediate, and flexible exchange rate regimes.

The regional offices of the Bank conducted a survey of 140 Canadian companies (representing all non-government sectors of the economy) to study the effects of restructuring (defined as a major change in the way firms do business).

There is ample evidence that information and communication technologies (ICT) contributed significantly to the surge in output and labour-productivity growth in the United States in the late 1990s.

An important issue in the debate over the desirability of freer capital mobility for developing countries is whether capital flows have significant effects on economic growth. Proponents of capital account liberalization cite the growth-promoting attributes of capital inflows as a key benefit of financial integration for developing countries.