The literature on the relationship between the size of government and economic growth is full of seemingly contradictory findings. This conflict is largely explained by variations in definitions and the countries studied. An alternative approach—of limiting the focus to studies of the...

While previous research documents a negative relationship between government size and economic growth, suggesting an economic cost of big government, a given government size generally affects growth differently in different countries. As a possible explanation of this differential effect, we...

Swedish Manufacturing Industry is said to be technologically and commercially in good shape. While Swedish wage levels were higher than in all industrial countries in the mid-70s, wages - expressed in international currencies - have now dropped to a mid-position, and real rates of return are...

FDI has received surprisingly little attention in theoretical and empirical work on openness and growth. This paper presents a theoretical growth model where MNCs directly affect the endogenous growth rate via technological spillovers. This is novel since other endogenous growth models with...

Can income equality be combined with high economic efficiency and rapid economic growth? Fortunately, we need not to answer such a general question. Indeed, the question is poorly phrased. The relationship between income and wealth distribution, on one hand, and efficiency/growth, on the other,...

After a severe crisis in the early 1990s, the Swedish economy experienced a boom in productivity growth. According to economists there have been primarily three explanations for the fast productivity growth in 1995–2004: Market reforms, recovery from the crisis and the impact of information...

This paper presents a model of R&D-driven growth without scale effects where firms can engage in both horizontal and vertical R&D activities. Unlike in earlier models of R&D-driven growth without scale effects by Jones (1995), Segerstrom (1998) and Young (1998), R&D subsidies can have long-run...

This paper presents a model to explain why both industry leaders and follower firms often invest in R&D and explores the welfare implications of these R&D investment choices. Regardless of initial conditions, the equilibrium path in this model involves gradually convergence to a balanced growth...

In a recent review article Jonas Agell, Thomas Lindh and Henry Ohlsson (1997) claim that theoretical and empirical evidence does not allow any conclusion on whether there is a relationship between the rate of economic growth and the size of the public sector. They illustrate their conclusion...

A number of cross-country comparisons do not find a robust negative relationship between government size and economic growth. In part this may reflect the prediction in economic theory that a negative relationship should exist primarily for rich countries with large public sectors. In this paper...