The paper examines empirically the changes in the tax mix of the OECD countries in response to economic growth from 1980 to 1999. It is found that economic growth, measured by GDP per capita, has had a significant effect on the tax mix of the OECD countries. Analysis reveals that different taxes respond differently to the growth of GDP per capita. It is shown that while the shares of personal and property taxes have responded positively to economic growth, shares of the payroll and goods and services taxes have shown a relative decline.

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Previous research has suggested that Islamic banking systems may be more stable than Western systems. However, this contention has only been tested empirically for the case of Tunisia, a country with no significant history of Islamic banking. This paper replicates the study done on Tunisia for the case of Iran, a country with some history of Islamic banking. The results are mixed, with some evidence both for and against the hypothesis of greater stability for Islamic banking. It is suggested that a good deal more work must be done to prove claims about the relative stability of Islamic banking.

The impact of trade openness on growth of total factor productivity (TFP) is investigated. Given the differences in tradability of goods across sectors as well as the ongoing structural change, we examine whether trade openness has had a differential impact on TFP growth of the three main sectors of an economy. While the positive impact of openness on TFP growth for the aggregate economy is confirmed, openness has had no appreciable impact on the growth of TFP in the agricultural and industrial sectors. We find that the positive effect of openness on TFP growth for the economy as a whole was mostly due to the positive relationship between the two variables for the services sector. Further, we conclude that the lack of a general consensus in past studies could be due to their neglect of structural change and temporal factors when analyzing the trade-TFP nexus.Trade, openness, sectors, total factor productivity,

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