A clear understanding of the rapid development of the newly industrialized economies (NIEs) of Asia remains elusive, with disputes over the roles of technology growth, capital accumulation, and international trade and investment. Most notably, alternative approaches to growth accounting yield...

Received wisdom maintains that LDCs ought to pursue pro-growth fiscal policy if it is incentive-feasible. We extend a standard model of growth to include imperfect, endogenously determined, property rights, and re-examine the welfare consequences of fiscal policy. Contrary to conventional...

This paper applies the insights of the literature on idiosyncratic shocks to inividual labor productivity to the dynamics of plant-level total factor productivity. Recent work in I.O. has emphasized the importance of firm- and plant-level heterogeneity in total factor productivity. Most of the...

Standard growth accounting exercises find large cross--country differences in aggregate TFP. Here we ask whether specific sectors are driving these differences, and, if this is the case, which these problem sectors are. We argue that to answer these questions we need to consider four sectors. In...

We perform development decompositions measuring the effect of trade restrictions on TFP and labor productivity. An economy with two tradable and non-storable intermediate goods, used in the production of a non-tradable final good, is assumed. The solution of the static trade and factor...

This article presents a group of exercises of level and growth decomposition of output per worker using cross-country data from 1960 to 2000. Its shown that at least until 1975 factors of production ( capital and education) were the main cause of output dispersion and that productivity variance...