Empirical evidence suggests that the differences in rates of technical progress across sectors are time-variant, implying that the bias in technological change is not constant. In this paper, we analyze the implications of this nonconstant sectoral biased technical change for structural change and we assess whether this is an important factor behind structural transformations. To this end, we d...

Economists and political scientists have argued that differences in the risk of civil conflict across countries and over time may partly reflect differences in the opportunity cost of participating in civil conflicts. One way to test for the opportunity-cost channel is to examine civil conflict risk following transitory income shocks. In this paper I propose two instrumentalvariables approaches...

This paper reviews and documents methodology for fitting hidden Markov switching models to New Zealand GDP data. A primary objective is to better understand the utility of these methods for modelling growth and volatility regimes present in the New Zealand data and their interaction. Properties of the models are developed together with a description of the estimation methods, including use of t...

We introduce endogenous directed technical change into numerical integrated climate and development policy assessment. We distinguish expenditures on innovation (R&D) and imitation (international technology spillovers) and consider the role of capital investment in creating and implementing new technologies. Our main contribution is to calibrate and numerically solve the model and to examine th...

Direct measurement techniques have recently been employed by some statistical agencies for the government output components in the SNA. These methods use proxies and indictator for outputs due to the inherent lack of market valuations. This article investigates the pros and cons of these new approaches and compares them with the traditional input method. This leads us to take a deeper look at t...

Article history: Received 22 April 2011 Received in revised form 8 April 2013 Accepted 14 April 2013 Available online 23 April 2013 Using a panel dataset of 31 provinces in China, this paper computes the output-oriented Malmquist productivity indexes and their decomposition in China's agricultural sector over the period 1994–2008. In the second-stage regression, which uses the efficiency change...

This study explores the link between economic growth and penile length between 1960 and 1985. It estimates an augmented Solow model utilizing the Mankiw-Romer-Weil 121 country dataset. The size of male organ is found to have an inverse U-shaped relationship with the level of GDP in 1985. Economic development between 1960 and 1985 is negatively associated with the size of male organ. With consid...

The “middle-income trap” is the phenomenon of hitherto rapidly growing economies stagnating at middle-income levels and failing to graduate into the ranks of high-income countries. In this study we examine the middle-income trap as a special case of growth slowdowns, which are identified as large sudden and sustained deviations from the growth path predicted by a basic conditional convergence f...

No. There has never been good evidence for a pattern of rising inequality in low-income countries and falling inequality in higher income countries. The only evidence that appears to support the Kuznets hypothesis is the cross-sectional pattern of inequality levels across countries, although the Kuznets hypothesis is an assertion about the path of inequality within countries. Numerous cross-sec...

We investigate the role of initial conditions at colonial independence on economic growth in Africa in the post-independence period using Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA). A key innovation in our estimation methodology is that we incorporate parameter heterogeneity in model averaging as well as try to mitigate the endogeneity problem present in growth regressions. In order to ensure that differen...