In a recent paper I argued that Baumol's (1967) model of unbalanced growth offers a ready explanation for the observed secular rise in health care expenditure (HCE) in rich countries (HARTWIG 2006). Baumol's model implies that HCE is driven by wage increases in excess of productivity growth. I...

Hartwig (2008) has presented empirical evidence that the difference between real wage growth and productivity growth at the macroeconomic level is a robust explanatory variable for deflated health-care expenditure growth in OECD countries. In this paper, we test whether this finding is robust to...

The share of health care expenditure in GDP rises rapidly in virtually all OECD countries, causing increasing concern among politicians and the general public. Yet, economists have to date failed to reach an agreement on what the main determinants of this development are. This paper revisits...

Keynes's essay “Relative Movements of Real Wages and Output” is widely believed to be an important amendment to his General Theory because, in this essay, Keynes relaxed his core assumption of decreasing marginal returns to labour. Non-decreasing marginal returns, however, do not sit...

The paper combines Baumol’s model of structural change with a model of aggregate demand growth in the Keynesian-Kaleckian tradition to predict the dynamics of aggregate employment. The model for the demand regime is estimated with – and Baumol’s model for the productivity regime is...