This paper develops a model to understand mechanisms behind the rise of mass consumption societies. The development process depicted in the model follows the Flying Geese pattern, in which a series of industries takes off one after another. As productivity improves in these industries, each...

The recent work on misallocation argues that aggregate productivity in poor countries is low because various market frictions prevent marginal products from being equalized. By focusing on such allocative inefficiencies, misallocation is construed as a purely static phenomenon. This paper argues...

We revisit Western Europe’s record with labor-productivity convergence, and tentatively extrapolate its implications for the future path of Eastern Europe. The poorer Western European countries caught up with the richer ones through both higher rates of physical capital accumulation and...

Developing countries are vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change, yet there is disagreement about what they should do to protect themselves from antic- ipated damages. In particular, it is unclear what the optimal balance is between investments in traditional productive capital...

This paper explores the role of knowledge flows and TFP growth by using direct survey data on knowledge flows linked to firm-level TFP growth data. Our knowledge flow data correspond to the kind of information flows often argued, especially by policy-makers, as important, such as within the...

Are individuals more sensitive to losses than gains in macroeconomic growth? Using subjective well-being measures across three large data sets, we observe an asymmetry in the way positive and negative economic growth are experienced, with losses having more than twice as much impact on...

Structural adjustment, as measured by the number of adjustment loans from the IMF and World Bank, reduces the growth elasticity of poverty reduction. Growth does reduce poverty, but the author find no evidence for a direct effect of structural adjustment on growth. Instead, the poor benefit less...

The relation between growth, inequality and poverty is the central theme of the paper. While the fast economic growth under the neo-liberal policy regime helps reduce poverty, it increases inequality in income distribution in a way that retards the progress in poverty-reduction. The empirical...

We study the mechanics of transmission of fiscal shocks to labour markets. We characterize a set of robust implications following government consumption, investment and employment shocks in a RBC and a New- Keynesian model and use part of them to identify shocks in the data. In line with the...

This paper provides a fully micro-founded New Keynesian framework to study the interaction between oil price volatility, pricing behavior of firms and monetary policy. We show that when oil has low substitutability, firms find it optimal to charge higher relative prices as a premium in...