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...

A reduction in income tax rates generates substantial dynamic responses within the framework of the standard neoclassical growth model. The short-run revenue loss after an income tax cut is partly - or, depending on parameter values, even completely - offset by growth in the long-run, due to the...

This paper analyses how the degree of regional integration affects regional differences in production structures and income levels. With high transport costs, industry is spead across regions to meet final consumer demad. As transport costs fall, increasing returns interacting with labour...

We develop a model in which the interaction between transport costs, increasing returns, and labour migration across sectors and regions creates a tendency for urban agglomeration. Demand from rural areas favours urban dispersion. European urbanisation took place mainly in the XIX Century, with...

Two issues related to mapping a multi-sector model into a reduced-form value-added model are often neglected: the composition of intermediate goods, and the distinction between value added productivity and gross output productivity. We demonstrate their quantitative significance for the case of...

In Part A of the present study, subtitled 'The Consumption Function as Solution of a Boundary Value Problem' Discussion Paper No. TE/96/297, STICERD, London School of Economics, we formulated a Brownian model of accumulation and derived sufficient conditions for optimality of a plan generated by...

This paper reviews the cross-country record of economic growth, using as organizing framework how economic theory has guided that empirical analysis. The paper argues that recent studies of economic growth—both empirical and theoretical—distinguish from previous work in three distinct...

How big a boost to long run growth can countries expect from the ICT revolution? I use the results of growth accounting and the insights from a two-sector growth model to answer this question. The use of a two-sector rather than a one-sector model is required because of the very rapid rate at...