Showing 1 - 10 of 68
This paper provides the first quantitative assessment of Jamaican standards of living and income inequality around 1774. To this purpose we compute welfare ratios for a range of occupations and build a social table. We find that the slave colony had extremely high living costs, which rose...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012453817
abundant Europe and the high-wage, labor scarce New World. Those global forces contributed to a reduction in unskilled labor … scarcity in the New World and to a rise in unskilled labor scarcity in Europe. Thus, it contributed to rising inequality in … overseas countries, like the United States, and falling inequality in most of Europe. Falling unskilled labor scarcity and …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012466110
If we have learned anything from the recent outpouring of empirical growth equations is that life is far too complex to expect unconditional' convergence among all countries and at" all times. This fact motivates two questions. First, why has it taken economists so long to learn" the same lesson...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012472568
Did independence push Latin America down a growth-inequality trade-off? During the late colonial decades, the region completed two centuries of growth unmatched anywhere and inequality reached spectacular heights. During the half century after insurgency and independence, inequality fell steeply...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012462972
The endogenous growth literature has explored the transition from a Malthusian world where real wages, living standards and labor productivity are all linked to factor endowments, to one where (endogenous) productivity change embedded in modern industrial growth breaks that link. Recently,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012465599
This study grounds the establishment of EMU and the euro in the context of the history of international monetary cooperation and of monetary unions, above all in the U.S., Germany and Italy. The purpose of national monetary unions was to reduce transactions costs of multiple currencies and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012464832
There are some striking similarities between the pre 1914 gold standard and EMU today. Both arrangements are based on fixed exchange rates, monetary and fiscal orthodoxy. Each regime gave easy access by financially underdeveloped peripheral countries to capital from the core countries. But the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012459549
Monetary policy regimes encompass the constraints or limits imposed by custom, institutions and nature on the ability of the monetary authorities to influence the evolution of macroeconomic aggregates. This paper surveys the historical experience of both international and domestic (national)...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012472613
In a static setup, migration of unskilled labor may be resisted by the entire native-born population because, being relatively low earners, migrants are net beneficiaries of the fiscal system. However, the paper shows that with a pay-as-you-go pension, an important pillar of the welfare state,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012471787
Foreign direct investment (FDI) is observed to be a predominant form of capital flows to emerging economies, especially when they are liquidity-constrained internationally during a global financial crisis. The financial aspects of FDI are the focus of the paper. We analyze the problem of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012471927