The tropics, sadly, continues to be a belt of poverty. The countries of the tropics all have low or middling incomes, with a few tiny or natural-resource-rich exceptions, and few of the poorest countries are outside of the tropics. The causes of tropical poverty are surely complex, involving initial endowments (Diamond), history, especially colonization, and geographical isolation (Gallup and S...

BACKGROUND Caregiver productivity costs are an important component of the overall cost of care for individuals with birth defects and developmental disabilities, yet few studies provide estimates for use in economic evaluations. OBJECTIVE This study estimates labor market productivity costs for caregivers of children and adolescents with spina bifida. METHODS Case families were recruited fr...

Economic Reforms and Productivity-Enhancing Reallocation in the Post-Soviet Transition How do economic reforms affect resource reallocation processes and their contributions to productivity growth? This paper studies the consequences of enterprise privatization and liberalization of product markets, labor markets, and imports in the former Soviet Republics of Russia and Ukraine. Analyzing inter...

Regio~lal variations in labor costs attract a great deal of attention because of their poterttial to affect the regional distribution of eco~lomic activity. Because of the tnajor role that labor costs play in total production costs, regional differences in labor costs Inay translate into dramatic regional differences in profitability. Profitability, in turn, is a major determinant of a~hether o...

Immigration and Labor Productivity: New Empirical Evidence for Spain The purpose of this paper of this paper is to explore the immigration and productivity in Spain. We estimate the effect of immigration on labor productivity from 2004 until 2008 for Spain. Using firms (SABI) and individuals data (Social Security Records) we calculate the effect by sector and municipality for the two big Spanis...

Human cooperation is the result of three factors: the differences among men and/or the geographical distribution of nature-given factors of production; the higher productivity achieved under the division of labor based on the mutual recognition of private property (the exclusive control of every man over his own body and his physical appropriations and possessions) as compared to either self-su...

This research aims to study the main influencing factors of China’s industrial carbon productivity by incorporating environmental regulation and technical progress into an econometric model. The paper focuses on data from 35 of China’s industrial sectors and covers the period from 2006 to 2014, in order to examine the impact of environmental regulation and technical progress on carbon productiv...

The financial crisis of 2008 was followed by sharp contractions in aggregate output and employment and an unusual increase in aggregate total factor productivity (TFP). This paper attempts to explain these facts by modeling the creation and destruction of jobs in the presence of heterogeneity in firm productivity and frictional credit and labor markets. The aggregate level of TFP is determined ...

This paper revisits the macroeconomic effects of government consumption in the neoclassical growth model augmented with idiosyncratic investment (or entrepreneurial) risk. Under complete markets, a permanent increase in government consumption has no long-run effect on the interest rate, the capital-labor ratio, and labor productivity, while it increases work hours due to the familiar negative w...

Decision making in companies requires an assessment of the efficiency and productivity of individual inputs to provide insights into the scope for improvement of inputs' use. This paper estimates an inputspecific Luenberger productivity growth indicator that can be decomposed to identify the contributions of input-specific technological change, technical efficiency change and scale efficiency c...