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Ghana has been the recipient of large levels of aid since the 1980s. This coincides with significant improvements in the country including increased growth and poverty reduction. We analyze the role of foreign aid in Ghana’s success. Using annual data from 1961 to 2012, we employ an error correction model to estimate the long-run relationship between aid and conditional aid in Ghana’s economic growth. We find that conditional aid has a positive and statistically significant impact on growth. Through an examination of Ghana over three phases with varying aid and conditionality, we conclude that Ghana’s success with conditional aid is related to the country’s ownership of reforms.

Competitive exposure, U.S. imports, African export competitiveness, F41, F15, C32,

While the underground economy is not explicitly included in the measure of (GDP), the cocaine trade has been a major source of revenue for Colombia. Using quarterly cocaine prices from 1982 to 2007 published by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, this paper uses vector error correction and forecast error variance decomposition methods to look at the relationship between cocaine prices and the peso/$ nominal exchange rate. Our results indicate cocaine prices affect the value of the Colombian peso, which leads to some interesting policy implications.

This paper examines the effects of the Great Recession on employment by gender in Pennsylvania. Using the Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) in the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) data set from the Census Bureau, we examine the employment dynamics for Pennsylvania by gender from Q1 of 1997 to Q4 of 2013. We investigate the impacts of the Great Recession on male and female employment in the Pennsylvania economy in the manufacturing, construction, healthcare, and retail sectors by investigating the net job gains by gender using a vector error correction model (VECM).

Measures of entrepreneurship, such as average establishment size and the prevalence of start-ups, correlate strongly with employment growth across and within urban areas. Is it possible for entrepreneurship to occur outside of urban areas and be active in rural areas such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia? There are causal links of entrepreneurial finance to industry or city growth but little link of the evidence of entrepreneurship outside of urban areas overall. This chapter examines the regional variation in startup concentration used to predict employment in the rural areas of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia by metropolitan statistical area (MSA)/micropolitan areas for the year 2017. The authors find significant differences in new firm formation rates from industrial regions to technologically progressive regions using the generalized linear models (GLM). Variations in firm birth rates are explained by industrial size, population growth, the number of startups, human capital variables, and establishments.

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