Examination of special cases assists understanding of the mechanics of long-run economic growth more generally. Australia and California are two economies having the rare distinction of achieving 150 years of sustained high and rising living standards for rapidly expanding populations. They are...

This work explores how Argentina overcame the Great Depression and asks whether active macroeconomic interventions made any contribution to the recovery. In particular, we study Argentine macroeconomic policy as it deviated from gold-standard orthodoxy after the final suspension of...

Latin America began the twentieth century as a relatively poor region on the periphery of the world economy. One cause of a low level of income per person was capital scarcity. Long run growth via capital deepening requires either the mobilization of domestic capital through savings, or large...

This paper develops a unified model of growth, population, and technological progress that is consistent with long-term historical evidence. The economy endogenously evolves through three phases. In the Malthusian regime, population growth is positively related to the level of income per capita....

The long-run economic performance of Argentina since World War One has been relatively disappointing until recently. Yet, in the interwar period, signs of future retardation and" recurring crises were not so obvious. It is often claimed that an unmitigated success was the" remarkably rapid...

From the 1930s to the 1980s, economic policies in Latin America epitomized the inward-looking model of development. The model emerged in the Depression, and was later codified in unorthodox economic theories. Even though economic performance was seen as disappointing by the 1960s, the...

This paper examines the relationship between openness, trade, and migration in the Asia-Pacific region during the post-1970 period. Conventional reduced-form empirical-growth specifications are augmented by an appeal to structural modelling, an extension that reveals a rich set of interactions...

This paper examines a novel mechanism linking fertility and growth. Household fertility is determined by relative wages of women and men. Increasing women's wages reduces fertility by raising the cost of children relatively more than household income. Lower fertility raises the level of capital...

Why did per capita income divergence occur so dramatically during the 19th Century, rather than at the outset of the Industrial Revolution? How were some countries able to reverse this trend during the globalization of the late 20th Century? To answer these questions, this paper develops a...

Economists use micro-based and macro-based approaches to assess the effects of health on economic growth. The micro-based approach tends to find smaller effects than the macro-based approach, thus presenting a micro-macro puzzle regarding the economic return on health. We reconcile these two...