This paper studies growth and inequality in China and India – two economies that account for a third of the world’s population. By modelling growth and inequality as components in a joint stochastic process, the paper calibrates the impact each has on different welfare indicators and on the...

Economies at early stages of development are often shaken by abrupt changes in growth rates, whereas in advanced economies growth rates tend to be relatively stable. To explain this pattern, we propose a theory of technological diversification. Production makes use of different input varieties,...

There has been a shift, in recent years, in the understanding of the process of development. It is not a switch (as often portrayed) from a state-dependent view of development to a market-reliant view. Rather, it involves rejecting a "blood, sweat and tears" view of development in favour of...

This paper estimates a structural model of economic geography using cross-country data on per capita income, bilateral trade, and the relative price of manufacturing goods. More than 70% of the variation in per capita income can be explained by the geography of access to markets and to sources...

Standard indicators of economic success leave out many aspects of development that are crucial to the well-being and freedom of citizens. We have to examine critically the ends as well as the means involved in development strategies. The impact of public education, health care, social security,...

This paper investigates the determinants of countries’ export performance looking in particular at the role of international product market linkages. We begin with a novel decomposition of the growth in countries’ exports into the contribution from increases in external demand and from...

This paper presents a model of social learning about the suitability of local conditions for new business ventures and explores its implications for the microeconomic patterns of economic development. I show that: i) firms tend to ‘rush’ into business ventures with which other firms have had...

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...