The carbon tax is a major instrument for curbing greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. Yet its adoption has been limited because of concerns over its effects on economic growth, income distribution, and international competitiveness. The paper shows that policymakers can minimize...

Not anytime soon. Using a novel dataset covering 127 countries and spanning two centuries, we find evidence for an energy Kuznets curve, with an initial decline of energy demand at low levels of per capita income followed by stages of acceleration and then saturation at high-income levels....

A prolonged low-interest-rate environment presents a significant challenge to banks and is likely to entail major changes to their business models over the long-run. Lower returns to maturity transformation in the face of flatter yield curves and an inability to offer deposit rates significantly...

This paper uses the standard one-sector neoclassical growth model to investigate why China''s consumption has been low and investment high. It finds that the low cost of capital has been quantitatively an important factor. Theory predicts that the price of capital may have been significantly...

The purpose of this paper is to explain the humped-shaped behavior of the growth rate. Within a dynamic general equilibrium framework, it is found that, in the early stages of development, the source of growth is the reallocation of resources from sectors low-productivity sectors to...

This paper argues that natural resource abundance creates opportunities for rent-seeking behavior and is an important factor in determining a country’s level of corruption. In a simple growth model, we illustrate the interrelationships between natural resources, corruption, and economic...

In this paper, the IMF''s new Global Economy Model (GEM) is used to estimate the contribution of unbalanced growth to the decline in the share of goods production in Australia and New Zealand. The simulation results suggest that faster productivity growth in the tradable goods sector in...

This paper examines the possibility of nonlinear effects of inflation on economic growth. It finds evidence of a significant structural break in the function that relates economic growth to inflation. The break is estimated to occur when the inflation rate is 8 percent. Below that rate,...

This paper examines a two-sector aggregative growth model with human capital and educated unemployment. In the model, a tuition subsidy may lead to a long-run decline in the educated fraction of the population, because it may decrease the long-run per capita stock of physical capital in the...

This paper examines the dynamics of economic growth. First, it demonstrates that the standard neoclassical growth model with constant elasticity of intertemporal substitution is not consistent with the patterns of development we observe in the real world, once we consider the initial conditions....