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...

In a world where poor countries provide weak protection for intellectual property rights, market integration will systematically shift technical change in favor of rich nations. For this reason, free trade can increase international income differences. At the same time, integration with countries where intellectual property rights are weakly protected can have a large adverse effect on the worl...

Because of its inappropriability, protection of property rights is widely recognized as being the state’s responsibility. Moreover, recent empirical evidence suggests that it leads to higher investment levels and faster growth. Nevertheless, the extent of property rights protection differs significantly across countries. This paper endogenizes the emergence of property rights within a simple gr...

This paper quantifies the contributions of sectoral productivity growth and structural change to aggregate productivity convergence. Existing evidence is inconclusive because it focuses on convergence within sector and its methodology depends sensitively on the conversion factor used to compare sectoral productivity levels across countries. Thus, a methodology – β-decomposition – is proposed to...

We introduce publicly funded education into R&D-based economic growth theory. Our framework allows us to i) explicitly describe a realistic process of human capital accumulation within these types of growth models, ii) reconcile semi-endogenous growth theory with the empirical evidence on the relationship between economic development and population growth, and iii) revise the policy invariance ...

Using a two-bloc endogenous growth model calibrated to two generic sending and receiving countries of equal size, we assess the growth and welfare impact of world migration flows of different skill compositions. The sending country (East) has a lower total factor productivity and a lower endowment of skilled labour. Migration can induce two growth-enhancing effects: an efficiency effect from th...

This paper provides an overview of methodologies used to analyze inter-regional income inequality, and a critical survey of empirical studies that deal with Russian regions. It discusses implications of the growth theory regarding dynamics of inter-economy income inequality. Methodologies for empirically analyzing income inequality are classified as the cross-section approach, time series appro...

In many models, economic growth is driven by people discovering new ideas. These models typically assume either a constant or growing population. However, in high income countries today, fertility already below its replacement rate: women are having fewer than two children on average. It distinct possibility that global population will decline rather stabilize the long run. standard this has pr...

There has been an unprecedented trade liberalization which started in the mid1980s in a wide spectrum of developing countries. In the same period, there have also been considerable changes in the tax structures of countries. This paper uses panel data on 65 countries, including 16 Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries, for the period 1980–1997 to examine how tax structures responded to ...

The Solow-Swan growth model predicts that growth should be uncorrelated with the ratio of national investment to GDP. If capital markets are open, the model predicts instantaneous convergence of GDP per capita across countries. Convergence is achieved by capital flows from rich to poor countries and a consequence of these flows is that the ratio of national savings to GDP in each country should...