This paper builds a two-country (North, South), two-sector (polluting, nonpolluting) trade model with directed technical change, examining whether unilateral environmental policies can ensure sustainable growth. The polluting good is produced with a clean and a dirty input. A temporary Northern policy combining clean research subsidies and a trade tax can ensure sustainable growth but Northern ...

We study the mechanisms according to which social infrastructure influences the preservation of physical capital and, consequently, economic growth. The presented model considers that social infrastructure is a specific type of human capital, which acts in order to preserve already existing physical capital, by, e.g. reducing the incentive for rent seeking or corruption. Using an innovative met...

This paper builds a two-country, two-sector (polluting, nonpolluting) trade model with directed technical change, examining whether unilateral environmental policies can ensure sustainable growth. The polluting good generates more or less emissions depending on its relative use of a clean and a dirty input. I show that a unilateral policy combining clean research subsidies and a trade tax can e...

As a consequence of falling relative demand for low skilled labor in the OECD, people with no or minor qualification experience a deterioration of their economic situation. While flexible labor markets have led to higher wage differentials in the USA, the major problem of most European countries is the high rate of unemployment of the low skilled. To integrate currently discussed determinants o...

This paper shows, in a two-sector Malthusian model of endogenous population growth, that output per capita, population density, and industrialization depend upon the labor intensity of agricultural production. Because the diminishing returns to labor are less pronounced, high labor intensity (as in rice production) leads not only to a larger population density but also to lower output per capit...

We generalize a trade model with firm-specific heterogeneity and R&D-based growth to allow for an endogenous education decision of households and an endogenously evolving population. Our framework is able to explain cross-country differences in living standards and trade intensities by the differential pace of human capital accumulation among industrialized countries. Consistent with the empiri...

a r t i c l e i n f o Available online xxxx JEL classifications: O33 O34 O41 Keywords: Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Economic growth North–south model In this paper, we develop a general equilibrium endogenous growth model that emphasizes the IPR enforcement effects on growth, in a scenario of north–south technological knowledge diffusion. The economy consists of three sectors, and firms a...

We consider economic growth in the presence of a minimal survival consumption level when preferences are lexicographic giving highest priority to the survival of the current and then all future generations. Knowledge of production is incomplete so future output made possible by current saving must be estimated. The resulting capital accumulation path is compared with the inter–temporally optima...

This paper considers the effects of aging in a currency union with endogenous growth. It is shown that mortality, labour supply and social security funding have no effect on inflation and pose therefore no problems for monetary integration. On the other hand, the demand for medical care speeds up inflation. Hence, if a currency union accepts a new member in which families have a relatively high...

Among the rich economies of the world today, per capita output levels had diverged before converging to the per capita output level of the frontier economy. Since frontier economies have grown at stable rates, non-frontier economies display an S-shape aggregate transition path. Along this transition, there are “catapult e¤ects”: longer episodes of divergence are associated with faster subsequen...