The conventional wisdom is that postwar economic growth has been unpredictable. In the 1960s few observers accurately forecast which countries would grow quickly. In this paper we show that indexes of social development constructed in the early 1960s have considerable predictive power. These...

We examine whether structural transformation leads to a Kuznets curve. We present a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous workers, occupational self-selection and selective migration, and calibrate the model to survey data for Malawi. We show that structural transformation raises...

This paper develops empirical growth models suitable for dual economies, and studies the relationship between structural change and economic growth. Changes in the structure of employment will raise aggregate productivity when the marginal product of labor varies across sectors. The models in...

Le présent document passe en revue les études empiriques consacrées aux effets de l’éducation et du capital social sur la croissance. Il porte principalement sur les données relatives aux pays de l’OCDE, mais fait également un tour d’horizon rapide d’informations empruntées à...

This paper surveys the empirical literature on the growth effects of education and social capital. The main focus is on the cross-country evidence for the OECD countries, but the paper also briefly reviews evidence from labour economics, to clarify where empirical work on education using macro...

The CES production function is increasingly prominent in macroeconomics and growth economics. This paper distinguishes between different uses of “normalized” CES functions, an approach that has become popular in the literature. The results of Klump and La Grandville (2000) provide a simple...

Since the early 1990s, there has been a renaissance in the study of regional growth, spurred by new models, methods and data. We survey a range of modelling traditions, and some formal approaches to the ’hard problem’ of regional economics, namely the joint consideration of agglomeration and...

We introduce a new `supply-push' instrument for foreign aid, to be used together with an instrumental variable estimator that filters out unobserved common factors. We use this instrument to study the effects of aid on macroeconomic ratios, and especially the ratios of consumption, investment,...

This paper introduces a framework for studying the optimal dynamic allocation of foreign aid among multiple recipients. We pose the problem as one of weighted global welfare maximization. A donor in the North chooses an optimal path for international transfers, anticipating that consumption and...

We examine whether structural transformation leads to a Kuznets curve. We present a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous workers, occupational self-selection and selective migration, and calibrate the model to survey data for Malawi. We show that structural transformation raises...