This study investigates the economic growth and catch-up of the Republic of Korea over the past half-century. The gap of output per worker between the Republic of Korea and United States has decreased rapidly, as the Republic of Korea's lower per capita income, relative to its potential level,...

While discussing the enhancement of the connectivity between Europe and Asia, this policy paper explores a new area of cooperation, which is the use of European long-term investment funds in Asia's infrastructure. We argue that, if Asian countries agree to offer 50% of their spillover revenue to...

Existing evidence, mostly from British textile industries, rejects the importance of formal education for the Industrial Revolution. We provide new evidence from Prussia, a technological follower, where early-19th-century institutional reforms created the conditions to adopt the exogenously...

The paper investigates the situation of middle-income economies around the world. Since 1965, only 18 economies with a population of more than 3 million and not dependent on oil exports have made the transition to being high income. Many more have not been able to move beyond the middle-income...

Based on required growth rate and actual growth rate, this paper proposes a method to construct measures to indicate the probability of a country escaping the middle income trap (MIT). A second contribution of this paper is to model this probability using 1960–2015 cross-country data, focusing...

This paper develops a new open-economy endogenous growth model where technology diffusion allows for a stable and non-degenerate world income distribution. In accordance with the empirical literature, I find that country characteristics such as the social infrastructure, the degree of openness,...

This paper provides a new data set of regional income inequalities within countries based on satellite nighttime light data. We first empirically study the relationship between luminosity data and regional incomes for those countries where regional income data are available. We subsequently use...

What is a good reduced-form representation of Ramsey-Cass-Koopmans. (RCK) model? Solow's model (despite non-optimizing agents) provides predictions largely consistent with a closed-economy RCK but fundamentally differs regarding open-economy income convergence. Where RCK predicts partial income...

The problem faced by many of the economies making up the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is whether they can avoid the middle-income trap and advance to the high-income level. What is needed for them to avoid the middle-income trap? This paper attempts to answer this question by...

This paper studies the catching-up process in per capita income of the so-called Asian Dragons and Tigers. It contributes to the literature in several ways. First, it tests the catching-up hypothesis using the longest time span ever considered, from 1870 to 2014. Second, it documents the...