While the worldwide spread of smartphones continues, developing countries have become important markets for these devices. Smartphones’ independence of landline networks qualifies them for communication and Internet access in rural areas of developing countries. Drawing upon rural Southeast...

Except for the Philippines between 1896 and 1939, Southeast Asia was never part of the century-long East Asian industrial catching up until after World War II. Before the 1950s, Southeast Asian manufacturing hardly grew at all: while commodity export processing did grow fast, import-competing...

We set up an endogenous growth model in which the efficiency of both capital and fossil energy can be improved, whereas the efficiency of one alternative energy source is limited. With capital and energy as complements, there exist two steady states: one stagnant where energy is fully derived...

Does the concept of General Purpose Technologies help explain periods of faster and slower productivity advance in economies? The paper develops a new comparative data set on the usage of electricity in the manufacturing sectors of the USA, Britain, France, Germany and Japan and proceeds to...