M Emranul Haque received his Masters degree from the University of Dhaka (Bangladesh) and his PhD degree from the University of Manchester. Prior to joining the staff at Manchester in 2005, he has been a Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham (2003 – 2005), a Lecturer and an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Manchester (2001 – 2003) and a Lecturer at Bangladesh Open University (1996 – 1998).

Specific research interests:

Keywords: economic growth; poverty trap; government spending; public financing; corruption; governance; human capital; trade liberalization

His current research interests include Economic Development and Growth Theory, Trade Liberalization, and Applied Macroeconomics with the application of time series and panel data models.

His current work includes the investigation of the relationship between government policies, governance, trade liberalization and economic growth; causes and consequence of corruption; explaining the heterogeneous effects of human capital on growth, both from theoretical and empirical perspectives. 

Current research projects: 

He is currently undertaking research in four key areas:

Corruption and development

Research grant: ESRC Grant £44000 for the project "Corruption and Development", jointly with Keith Blackburn, 2004

The central objective of his research in this theme is to identify channels through which public sector corruption may both influence, and be influenced by, economic development.

Government expenditures and growth

His main focus in this area has been to empirically evaluate the composition and level effects of government expenditure policies on long-run economic growth in developing countries. The recent revival of interest in growth theory has also revived interest among researchers in verifying and understanding the linkages between the fiscal policies and economic growth.

Trade liberalization and economic growth

This has been relatively a new area of his research, the main focus of which has been to theoretically evaluate the impact of trade liberalization on the government and the economic activity.

Human capital and growth

Even though theoretically it is appealing to think human capital (i.e., education) as a positive source to generate higher economic growth, the empirical evidence is not clear in the literature. Particularly for developing countries, in standard growth regression, researchers even find negative effects. One of the arguments that came into surface to explain this puzzling findings is that perhaps the proxies that we use (e.g., school enrolment ratio, average schooling years) are not proper proxies to represent human capital in an economy. His aim is to look at different sets of explanations that cause human capital to have heterogeneous effects on developed and developing countries.