Changes in social structures occurring during the process of economic growth can be considered direct consequences of this process, while other changes are caused by factors such as technological progress, that affect simultaneously social structures and growth. This chapter focuses on that part...

Over 250,000 farmers have committed suicide in India since the mid-1990s. Studies – both case studies of states and at the individual-level - attribute these deaths to credit crunches in the agrarian sector and increased debt burden among farmers. Most of the farm suicides have, however, taken...

El desarrollismo ha sido, dentro de la estrategia de sustitución de importaciones de América Latina, una estrategia “especial”, o diferente, sobre todo en Brasil y la Argentina. En Brasil, bajo la forma de desarrollismo nacional, se extendió hasta los años ’90; se puede afirmar que en...

We use variation in oil output among Brazilian municipalities to investigate the effects of resource windfalls. We find muted effects of oil through market channels: offshore oil has no effect on municipal non-oil GDP or its composition, while onshore oil has only modest effects on non-oil GDP...

The debate on the "curse of natural resources" is a topical issue in empirical research on;economic development. This paper examines the relationship between natural resources and growth rates in a cross-section of countries, by separately analyzing abundance of resources and dependence on...

The paper examines long-term strategies of capital modernization under different assumptions about embodied technological change, energy regulation, and substitutability between energy and capital. To describe modernization of physical capital, the authors use a vintage capital model with the...

Cross-country labor productivity differences are larger in agriculture than in non-agriculture. We propose a new explanation for these patterns in which the self-selection of heterogeneous workers determines sector productivity. We formalize our theory in a general-equilibrium Roy model in which...

This paper proposes a transparent and robust measurement of sustainable human development for developing economies. We focus in particular on small island developing states [SIDS] which appear to be highly vulnerable in both economic and environmental dimensions. Hence, our contribution is...

In this paper we examine the role played by environmental externalities in shaping the dynamics of an economy with two sectors (a farming sector and an industrial one), free inter-sectoral labor mobility and heterogeneous agents (workers/farmers and industrial entrepreneurs). We find that, in...

This article investigates economic performance when enforceable property rights are missing and basic needs matter for consumption. It suggests a new view of the so-called voracity effect according to which windfall gains in productivity induce behavior that leads to lower economic growth....