We study long-run trends in aggregate market hours of work and shifts across economic sectors within the context of balanced aggregate growth. We show that a model of many goods and uneven TFP growth in market and home production can rationalize the observed falling or U-shaped aggregate hours...

The transition to market-based economic systems in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union involve fundamental shifts in the allocation of resources, and deep changes in the structure of production and employment. This Paper uses a simple model of economic...

This paper provides a unified growth theory, i.e. a model that explains the very long-run economic and demographic development path of industrialized economies, stretching from the pre-industrial era to present-day and beyond. Making strict use of Malthus’ (1798) so-called preventive check...

One of the most striking regularities of the growth process is the massive reallocation of labour from agriculture into industry and services. Balanced growth models are commonly used in macroeconomics because they are consistent with the well-known Kaldor facts about economic growth....

We study a multi-sector model of growth with differences in TFP growth rates across sectors and derive sufficient conditions for the coexistence of structural change, characterized by sectoral labour reallocation, and constant aggregate growth path. The conditions are weak restrictions on the...

To what extent has Sub-Saharan Africa’s slow economic growth over the past five decades been due to price and trade policies that have discouraged production of agricultural relative to non-agricultural tradables? This paper uses a new set of estimates of policy distortions to relative prices...

Long-run trends in Africa’s well-being are provided on the basis of a new index of human development, alternative to the UNDP’s HDI. A sustained improvement in African human development is found that falls, nonetheless, short of those experienced in other developing regions. Within Africa,...

Much African land currently has low productivity and has attracted investors purchasing (or leasing) land as a speculative option on higher future prices or productivity. If land deals are to be beneficial they need to induce productivity enhancing investments. Some of these will be publicly...

In their survey of the literature on ethnic fractionalization and economic performance, Alesina and La Ferrara (JEL 2005) identify two main directions for future research. One is to improve the measurement of diversity and the other to treat diversity as an endogenous variable. This paper tries...

For Africa, a regional customs union is unlikely to realise net welfare gains (in the sense of trade creation dominating trade diversion) which cannot be attained through unilateral trade liberalization. Unilateral reform has often failed in Africa, however. A regional customs union tied to...