Latin America suffers from two financial obstacles to development. First, the region labors under a scarcity of capital, a scarcity that is reflected in the high cost and poor terms on which it is provided to most firms and households in the region. This scarcity of capital limits prospects for...

Since the beginning of the 1990s, there has been a lot of enthusiasm over the anticipated Latin American 'miracle'. In this study, Professor Hernando Gomez Buendia explores the background, facts and achievements of the development experience in the region during the 1990s. He discusses in depth...

This paper analyzes the role of the structure of skills in economic development through investment in human capital. With a lack of cresit market for education and the presence of indivisibilities in investment in human capital as well as of congestion in the educational system, the initial...

Low levels of human capital ivnestment in poor countries have important implications for economic growth, distribution, and social conditions -- and competing explanations for the low levels have been suggested. The most prominent explanations cite low returns, parental preferences, cultural...

This paper discusses three key elements of stochastic growth in the Schumpeterian dynamics. These elements comprise the new entry of firms in an industry, the displacement of the old technology by the new and the nonlinear impact of learning by doing on the growth of innovating firms. Each of...

We present a model of endogenous firm growth with R&D investment and innovation as the engine of growth. The objective of our analysis is to present a framework that can be used for microeconometric analysis of firm performance in high-tech industries.

Broadly speaking, two schools of thought have emerged to interpret China's rapid growth since 1978 : the experimentalist school and the convergence school. The experimentalist school attributes China's successes to the evolutionary, experimental, and incremental nature of China's reforms. The...

This paper uses a new pre-1940 Third World data base documenting real wages and relative factor prices to explore their determinants. There are three possibilities: external price shocks, factor endowment changes, and technological change. While the paper lays out an explicit econometric agenda...

Ethnic divisions explain a significatn part of Africa's slow growth and Africa's choice of growth-reducing policies. Africa's poor growth is associated with Africa's low schooling, political instability, underdeveloped financial systems, distorted foreign exchange markets, high government...

The topic of economic growth and convergence of countries has been an active topic in the 1990's. This paper investigates the question of whether there is any empirical evidence that countries are converging, with respect to their relative incomes, over time. To test for convergence, the...