Tropics and economic development: An empirical investigation

Abstract

Following Kamarck's (1976) reasoning, crosscountry regressions of income, life expectancy, schooling, human development, population increase, capital accumulation, and economic growth are estimated with the country's distance from the equator as an explanatory variable. The distance-parameter shows high statistical significance and is quantitatively substantial in all cases. Several versions of the Solow-models formulated by Mankiw et al. (1992) are also reestimated after including the distance variable, which shows high significance in these cases too. Some implications of the regression estimates are noted. © 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.