Productivity and income growth rates and differentials vary widely among OECD countries. In this chapter, Bart van Ark develops a framework for the understanding of these productivity and income differences. The framework breaks GDP per capita into two basic drivers: labour supply and labour...

Implicit pension debt involved in existing pay-as-you-go public pension schemes is nowadays seen as an important determinant of the long-term sustainability of general government finances. Explicit up-dated calculations regarding its size are however largely lacking. The present paper takes up...

In developed countries, obesity tends to be associated with worse labor market outcomes. One possible reason is that obesity leads to less human capital formation early in life. This paper investigates the association between obesity and the developmental functioning of children at younger ages...

We study an overlapping generations model of human capital accumulation with threshold effects using regional data for West Germany. Our basic goal is to shed light on what makes German regions grow. The paper finds that the relative income distribution appears to be stratifying into a trimodal...

In developed countries, obesity tends to be associated with worse labor market outcomes. One possible reason is that obesity leads to less human capital formation early in life. This paper investigates the association between obesity and the developmental functioning of children at younger ages...

German metropolitan areas with more highly skilled workers became increasingly skilled between 1975 and 2003, and this has important implications for urban employment growth.Using for the first time German metropolitan areas instead of administrative regions we show that the share of college...

The author reviews the book Information Technology and the American Growth Resurgence by Dale Jorgenson, Mun Ho, and Kevin Stiroh, which provides a detailed analysis of the remarkable rebound in productivity and output growth in the last decade. He notes that the book can be considered a...

The paper by Masato Kimura seeks to clarify the contributions and limitations of Japanese business diplomacy by looking at the business mission to Britain and the US in 1921-22, and the Japanese Economic Mission to Europe and the United States of 1937. The paper argues that Japanese business...

This paper compares the level of uncertainty widely reported in climate change scientific publications with the level of uncertainty of the costs estimates of implementing the Kyoto Protocol in the United States. It argues that these two categories of uncertainties were used and ignored,...