Why Does Misallocation Persist?∗
نویسندگان
چکیده
There is growing interest in the view that underdevelopment may not just be a matter of lack of resources like capital, skilled labor, entrepreneurship or ideas but also a consequence of the misallocation or misuse of available resources. In particular Banerjee and Duflo (2005), Jeong and Townsend (2007), Restuccia and Rogerson (2008), Hsieh and Klenow (2009), Bartelsman et al. (2008), Alfaro et al. (2008) and Buera et al. (2008) all argue that the extent of misallocation of resources in poor countries is large enough to explain a very large part of the TFP gap between rich and poor countries. Evidence on the misallocation of resources takes many forms. There is evidence on interest rates suggesting that many smaller firms in developing countries borrow at interest rates of 50%, 80% or even higher. This suggests that these firms must have marginal returns on capital that are even higher. These high estimates of the marginal returns are consistent with the direct evidence on the return on capital in small to medium sized firms in developing countries that we get from randomized experiments, natural experiments and other sources. However, we see a very different picture when we look at the evidence on the aggregate marginal product of capital for various developing countries. Caselli and Feyrer (2007) find ∗We thank Daron Acemoglu, Olivier Blanchard, Steve Davis, Esther Duflo, Chang-Tai Hsieh and Pete Klenow for helpful comments and encouragement. Banerjee (2003) describes the evidence on this point and emphasizes that default is rare – so that these interest rates should be thought of as the rates that firms actually pay. See, for example, de Mel et al. (2008), Banerjee and Duflo (2008), Udry and Anagol (2006).
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تاریخ انتشار 2009