Recent studies on economic growth focuses on persistent inequality across countries. In this paper we study mechanisms that may give rise to such a persistent inequality. We consider countries that accumulate capital in order to increase the per capita income in the long run. We show that the long-run growth dynamics of those countries can generate a twin-peak distribution of per capita income....

Motivated by the observed rise in the trade of technology, I analyze how technology would spread in a frictionless market. In such a world, low-skilled agents prefer to use old technology because it costs less; their skills do not justify the use of frontier technology. The model generates a technology-life cycle of somewhere between 68 and 124 years and per-capita income differential factors b...

This paper demonstrates that institutional factors influence the subjective well-being of individuals differently in rich versus poor countries. A lower level of corruption, a more democratic government and better civil rights increase the well-being of individuals in rich countries, whereas an increase in per capita income has no impact. On the contrary, in poor countries the extent of corrupt...

This paper re-examines the Dollar and Kraay (2002) result that per capita real income for the poorest quintile in a country grows equiproportionately with the rest of the economy. Results obtained here using the Dollar and Kraay data set indicate that the real per capita income of the poor rises less than proportionately when growth is positive and falls dramatically when growth is negative. Th...

nomic development and growth has long been understood—emphasized, for example, in the writings of Adam Smith and, more recently, David Landes (1998), and recognized in the 1993 Nobel Prize awarded to Douglass North. In the past few years, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in this subject, including research into the sources of institutional differences across countries, the chann...

This paper evaluates the association between economic environment in the districts of Madrid (Spain) and physical inactivity, using income per capita as indicator of economic environment. The analysis included 6,601 individuals aged 16 to 74 years. The measure of association estimated was the prevalence odds ratio for physical inactivity by income per capita. After adjusting for sex, age, and i...

Governments all over the world would like to improve the well being of its citizen. One aspects of well being can be seen through the quality of life (QoL) a person enjoys. Measuring and determining what is QoL is not an easy task. In this paper, using per-capita income as the yardstick for QOL, and the role of government through the way it spend its public money would be able to tell how ASEAN...

The objective of this study is to measure regional income inequalities in Japan in the postwar period by using the weighted coefficient of variation and the Theil T index and explore factors determining regional income inequalities by using several inequality decomposition techniques. Regional inequality in per capita GDP, as measured by the weighted coefficient of variation, first increased an...