Large gaps in labor productivity between the traditional and modern parts of the economy are a fundamental reality of developing societies. In this paper, we document these gaps, and emphasize that labor flows from low-productivity activities to high...
SSA has grown rapidly over the last decade, but a curious feature of this growth was that it was accompanied by little structural change towards non-traditional tradables (such as manufactures). Now that China, the advanced economies, and most emerging...
Ideas are strangely absent from modern models of political economy. In most prevailing theories of policy choice, the dominant role is instead played by "vested interests"—elites, lobbies, and rent-seeking groups which get their way at the expense of the...
Green growth requires green technologies: production techniques that economize on exhaustible resources and emit fewer greenhouse gases. The availability of green technologies both lowers social costs in the transition to a green growth path and helps...
Unlike economies as a whole, manufacturing industries exhibit strong unconditional convergence in labor productivity. The article documents this at various levels of disaggregation for a large sample covering more than 100 countries over recent decades...
The nation-state has long been under attack from liberal economists and cosmopolitan ethicists alike. But it has proved remarkably resilient and remains the principal locus of governance as well as the primary determinant of personal attachments and...
Government use policy to achieve certain outcomes. Sometimes the desired ends are worthwhile, and sometimes they are pernicious. Cross-country regressions have been the tool of choice in assessing the effectiveness of policies and the empirical relevance...
The objective of international economic arrangements must be to attain the maximum amount of integration or the maximum thickness in economic transactions that are consistent with maintaining space for diversity in national institutions and the...
