Poor families around the world spend a large fraction of their income on consumption of goods that appear to be useless in alleviating poverty, while saving at very low rates and neglecting investment in health and education. Such consumption patterns seem to be related to the persistence of...

This is organized into three main parts. The first section provides a perspective on future productivity growth in Canada. It discusses key productivity concepts, looks at current productivity trends, examines the forces affecting future productivity growth, and reviews productivity projections...

Employed Canadians worked an average of 157 hours less per year than employed Americans during 1997-2004. This one month less per year spent on the job is a significant contributor to the difference in GDP per capita between Canada and the United States. This article provides a detailed...

The measurement of economic and social development is one of the most hotly contested subjects in economics. Since the 1970s, it has become evident that it is necessary to use a composite index to capture various aspects of social and human development and to address related issues of...

It is shown that the component statistics of the HDI are highly correlated with one another. An implication of this correlation is that a wide range of index weights produce indexes that are statistically identical to the HDI. Indexes with only two of the three HDI components are very highly...

The United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Index (HDI) has become a standard international measure of development. However, it has been criticized on several grounds. This paper investigates how robust the HDI is to changing two contentious aspects: the component statistics and...

That historical inequality can affect long run macroeconomic performance has been argued by a large literature on ‘endogenous inequality’ using models of indivisibilities in occupational choice, in the presence of borrowing constraints. These models are characterized by a continuum of steady...

The process of modernization is neither instantaneous nor homogeneous across countries. Given the large productivity growth gap between traditional and modern sectors, the gradual and varying degree of transition between these technologies seems puzzling. We develop a theory of transition that...

Real gross domestic product (GDP) fails to account for the trading gains and losses that result from changes in the terms of trade and in the real exchange rate (the price of tradables relative to the price of nontradables). Canada has enjoyed vast improvements in its terms of trade over recent...

This paper tests the importance of human capital in explaining convergence across states of the United States after 1880. Human capital levels are found to matter not only to a state's income level but also to its growth rate through technological diffusion. The South's low human capital levels...