How did Europe overtake China? We construct a simple Malthusian model with two sectors, and use it to explain how European per capita incomes and urbanization rates could surge ahead of Chinese ones. That living standards could exceed subsistence levels at all in a Malthusian setting should be surprising. Rising fertility and falling mortality ought to have reversed any gains. We show that prod...

The record of successful developmental states in East Asia and the partial successes of developmental states in Latin America suggest several common preconditions for effective state intervention including a weberian bureaucracy, monitoring of implementation, reciprocity (subsidies in exchange for performance), and collaborative relations between government and business. Although Brazil failed ...

This paper examines three software and/or information technology enabled services (ITES) industries—two in the early stages of development (in the People’s Republic of China [PRC] and the Philippines) and one mature one (in India). Being latecomers to offshoring work, the PRC and the Philippines have developed this industry in cooperation with multinational enterprises (MNEs). PRC firms have wo...

To what extent do firms rely on rural output for demand and capital? We provide new evidence on this classic development question by examining the impact of agricultural output on local economic activity. Rainfall provides exogenous and significant variation in rural earnings. We find that such fluctuations have a lasting impact on urban firms, with effects concentrated in the manufacturing sec...

Despite the perceived importance of labor market opportunities in shaping married women’s outside option, and their bargaining power within households as a result, this link has received very little empirical attention. Using longitudinal data on who makes the decision on a wide range of issues within Mexican households and data from the administrative records of the Mexican Social Security Ins...

This paper analyzes how access to imported inputs affects firms in developing countries, where domestically produced high-quality inputs are relatively costly. We build an O-Ring type model with quality complementarity across input tasks, ranking tasks by their qualitysensitivity. Because high-quality inputs are relatively cheap in international markets, firms use these instead of domestic inpu...

There has been a tendency throughout Latin America, in recent decades of the expansion of activities associated with reprimarization. The latter refers to all activities of extractivism, such as mining and petroleum, as well as agricultural activities, such as cattle and soy. These are linked to the strong growth of the commodities markets and the amazing growth of China. This paper examines th...

In this study, we analyze the e¤ects of a decrease in unskilled labor in China on the direction of innovation in the US by incorporating production o¤shoring into a North-South model of directed technical change. We …nd that if o¤shoring is present (absent) in equilibrium, then a decrease in unskilled labor in the South would lead to skill-biased (unskill-biased) technical change in the North. ...

This paper proposes a possible framework for identifying excessive investment. Based on this method, it finds evidence that some types of investment are becoming excessive in China, particularly in inland provinces. In these regions, private consumption has on average become more dependent on investment (rather than vice versa) and the impact is relatively short-lived, necessitating ever higher...

Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are regarded as primary examples of countries that have derived great benefits from increasing integration with the international economy, without surrendering national autonomy in the economic or cultural spheres, by pursuing decidedly nonneutral policies with respect to the promotion of specific sectors and activities. This working paper addresses a series of qu...