The capital-output ratio is more than 40% lower in the poor countries than in the richest ones. Comparing TFP in manufacturing and in the economy at large, we show that the Balassa-Samuelson effect explains the bulk of this scarcity: TFP in manufacturing is indeed about 40% lower than TFP in the...

This Paper presents a new set of data on human capital. It is constructed so as to stay as close as possible to the censuses compiled by national, OECD or UNESCO sources. We then use these data to test a model that embeds the Mincerian approach to human capital into the Mankiw, Romer and Weil...

The paper attempts to explain why single factor explanations of the poverty of nations are usually found to be unsatisfactory. Poor countries outside Africa, for instance, have an income per head which stands at about one third of the rich countries’ income per head. Yet each of the three...

In the first part of the paper I calculate the returns on developing countries' debt obtained by their (private and public) creditors (when taking account of the transfers already generated and of the liquidative value of the debt) and show that they are satisfactory. I then evaluate the...

The Paper highlights one critical difference between Europe and the US regarding the Phillips curve: the behaviour of prices. While they are quickly restored to an equilibrium level in the US, European prices are driven by highly counter-cyclical mark-ups. In bad times, European firms manage to...

If interest rates (country spreads) rise, debt can rapidly be subject to a snowball effect, which then becomes self-fulfilling with regard to the fundamentals themselves. This is a market imperfection, because we cannot be confident that the unaided market will choose the ‘good equilibrium’...