The author of this note takes it as self evident that prosperity and the provision of "things" (buildings, roads, furniture, furnishings, clothes, machines and equipment of all sorts) go together. The way people generally speak and act is in line with this view. If this is so, domestic...

Is industrial production relatively in decline? No, it is not. This note displays the evidence that for the last 40 years, in the 6 largest economies of the world, industrial production has kept pace with total output.

This paper argues that a significant part of measured TFP differences across countries is attributable not to technological factors that affect the entire economy neutrally, but rather, to variations in the structural composition of economies. In particular, the allocation of scarce inputs...

A reduction of trade barriers will influence the overall scale of agricultural activities, the structure of agricultural production in different countries, the mix of inputs and outputs, the production technology, and the regulatory framework. These adjustments, in turn, will impact on the...

The interest rate and the rate of economic growth are often regarded as roughly constant as economies grow. Moreover, the agricultural sector and rural population typically shrink. We show that an otherwise standard growth model that includes a backward and an advanced sector can account for...

We consider processes with second order long range dependence resulting from heavy tailed durations. We refer to this phenomenon as duration- driven long range dependence (DDLRD), as opposed to the more widely studied linear long range dependence based on fractional differencing of an $iid$...

The aim of this paper is to provide evidence about the existence or non- existence of structural breaks in exchange rates of European transition economies. We used the testing procedure of Vogelsang (1997) that allows for detecting a break at an unknown date in the trend function of a dynamic...

Since 1970 nearly all-Mediterranean countries of the EC had undertaken measures to regulate their domestic market for ordinary wines, in the context of constant fall in domestic demand for that product. This paper provides an empirical modelling framework for understanding the effect on the...

There is a wide consensus that New Zealand’s productivity has been poor despite the comprehensive market-oriented reforms of the 1980’s. This consensus is based on estimates of New Zealand’s productivity growth measured either in terms of GDP per capita or total factor productivity (TFP)....

This paper shows that a significant part of measured total factor productivity (TFP) differences across countries is attributable not to technological factors that affect the entire economy neutrally, but rather, to variations in the structural composition of economies. In particular, the...