The paper estimates an empirical relation based on Krugman’s “technological gap” model to explore the influence of the pattern of international trade and production on the overall productivity growth of a developing country. A key result is that increased import competition in medium-growth (but not in lowor highgrowth) manufacturing sectors enhances overall productivity growth. The authors als...

I analyze the effect of inequality on economic growth in Latin America, where inequality is measured as the area of family farms as a percentage of the total area of agricultural holdings. Using data from 18 Latin American countries between 1960 and 2004, I find that inequality has a nonlinear effect on economic growth. Overall, for the countries included in this analysis, the share of family f...

We find that trade and domestic market size are robust determinants of economic growth over the 1960-1996 period when trade openness is measured as the US dollar value of imports and exports relative to GDP in PPP US$ (“real openness”). When trade openness is measured as the US dollar value of imports and exports relative to GDP in exchange rate US$ (“nominal openness”) however, trade and the s...

This paper assumes that a subjective discount factor is affected by an average level of investment in future-oriented resources in an economy (investment externalities) in addition to a level of individual investment in future-oriented resources. Under this assumption, this paper considers a maximization problem formulated as a pseudo planning problem and shows the conditions under which equili...

This paper presents, within a framework of the Solow model, evidence that there should be two different reasons for convergence. One is due to diminishing returns to capital and the other is due to technological diffusion. This paper shows that OECD and low income countries follow a pattern of conditional convergence but middle income countries do not. This seems to imply that technological dif...

Rising educational attainment and research intensity in recent decades suggest that the U.S. economy is far from its steady state. This paper develops a model reconciling these facts with the stability of U.S. growth rates. In the model, long-run growth arises from the worldwide discovery of ideas, which depends on population growth. Nevertheless, constant growth can temporarily proceed at a fa...