The post-communist transition was associated with two specific phenomena. First, political liberalization was initiated simultaneously with economic reforms. Second, instead of a short Jshaped adjustment, most transition countries experienced deep and protracted recessions. Some analysts suggest that the early introduction of democracy was in fact harmful for economic growth. Similarly, propone...

Many technologies used by the LDCs are developed in the OECD economies and are designed to make optimal use of the skills of these richer countries’ workforces. Differences in the supply of skills create a mismatch between the requirements of these technologies and the skills of LDC workers, and lead to low productivity in the LDCs. Even when all countries have equal access to new technologies,...

In this paper we investigate three sources of economic growth and evolution of world income distribution during the 90’s: (i) technological change, (ii) efficiency change (the catching-up) and (iii) capital deepening. Our research is an extension to recent study of Kumar and Russell (2002), which we complement in two ways: we considering a more recent period (the 90’s instead of 1965-90) and, a...

This paper studies the impact of public infrastructure on economic performance. We employ three di¤erent methodologies to estimate the returns to public investment. First, we relate growth in total factor productivity to accumulation of public capital. Second, we assess the role of public capital as an input to production. Third, we evaluate the reduction in costs that can be attributed to the ...

The paper addresses the link between productivity and labour mobility. The hypothesis tested is that technology is transmitted across industries through the movement of skilled workers embodying human capital. The embodied knowledge is then diffused within the new environment creating spillovers and leading to productivity improvements. The empirical analysis is based on household survey and in...

We estimate a unified measure of inclusive growth for emerging markets by integrating their economic growth performance and income distribution outcomes, using data over three decades. Country distributions are calibrated by combining PPP GDP per capita and income distribution from survey data. We apply the microeconomic concept of a social mobility function at the macroeconomic level to measur...

This paper argues that technical change in the East Asian countries was sector-specific, took the form of learning-by-doing and was induced by relative factor prices. Usual growth accounting exercises do not account for this in the structure of the assumed aggregate production function and therefore miss these technical gains. Assumed or estimated elasticities of substitution are too high in th...

The effect of spatial agglomeration (localisation and urbanisation economies) on employment growth is explored over a balanced panel of 23,374 Italian firms, using a flexible Bayesian model. Contrary to previous research, the agglomeration economies measures are calculated using direct measures of physical distances between pairs of firms, rather than with respect to pre-specified geographical ...

This study intends to understand how disaster is related to countries’ production efficiency using a sample of 137 countries over 1980–2011. We analyze the effect of the number of man-made and natural disaster occurrences on countries’ technological change (swift of the frontier) and technological catch-up (distribution of efficiencies). The results reveal an inverted “U” shape relationship bet...

The goal of this study examines the quantitative implications of the Malmquist index in a standard Real Business Cycle (RBC) model as a measure of technology shock. To achieve this, the paper first investigates the empirical validity of the equivalence proposition on the two technology shock measures: a relatively new Malmquist Index and the predominant Solow residual. On the basis of permutati...