Nonlinear Growth and the Productivity Slowdown

In this paper we study the productivity slowdown taking as a starting point the nonlinear shape of the growth path. We relate the slowdown to the evolution of the world income distribution and show that i) in the periods before and after the oil shocks growth is nonlinear; ii) the productivity slowdown consists in a downward shift of the nonlinear growth path; iii) in both periods we observe a medium run tendency to polarization, but the long run distribution features convergence in the first period and polarization in the second. We provide theoretical and empirical arguments to suggest that the process of international transfer of technology in the context of nonlinear growth can provide useful insights to understand the productivity slowdown