The growth rate of total factor productivity seems to have increased recently, at least in the United States. Higher US productivity growth may justify higher stock market valuations than in the past and thus herald an emerging New Economy. However, the size of the estimated growth rate of total...

The paper studies the macroeconomic effects of government spending shocks in an economy characterized by positive trend growth. It shows that the lower is the trend growth rate the less inflationary are government spending shocks and vice versa. Moreover, on impact output is higher but exhibits...

Similar to most other developing countries, almost all Arab countries failed to catch up economically with advanced industrial countries. This paper discusses three possible explanations of the disappointing growth performance: (i) an insufficient reformmindedness of developing country...

Der Beitrag analysiert die Argentinien-Krise, vergleicht die makroökonomische Entwicklung von Argentinien, Brasilien, Chile und Mexiko seit der Mexiko-Krise und entwickelt Indikatoren zur Beurteilung der Entwicklungschancen dieser Länder. Für Argentinien wie für Brasilien, Chile und Mexiko...

Does immigration accelerate sectoral change towards high-productivity sectors? This paper uses the mass displacement of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II as a natural experiment to study this question. A simple two-sector model of the economy, in which moving...

This paper investigates social mobility in Bolivia and discusses its implications for poverty reduction and long-run growth. Regressions based on household survey data show that social mobility is very low in Bolivia, even by Latin American standards. This is mainly caused by an inadequate...

This paper investigates the relationship between the size of government and economic growth in OECD countries in 1960?2000. The underlying idea is that government expenditures on public goods basically have a positive effect on growth, but this growth effect tends to decline or even reverse when...

The paper elaborates on the employment intensity of growth. Previous evidence regarding this question is surveyed. Empirical results concerning Europe and selected other industrial countries reveal that the cyclical link between unemployment and growth is still stable in the nineties. However,...

The paper investigates by means of cointegration analysis whether the recently observed low levels of private saving and the current account balance in the United States are worrisome in the sense that they cannot be sufficiently explained by determinants which performed well in the past. Stock...