The analysis of the effect of tariffs for labor productivity faces the challenge of tariff policy endogeneity. Tariff policy is designed to promote economic development and the industrial sector tariff structure may reflect characteristics of the industries protected. We seek to identify the...

The barrier model of productivity growth suggests that individual country productivity is related to the world technology frontier disturbed by national barriers. We offer a country study of the barrier model exploiting the dramatic changes in the linkages to the world economy in South Africa....

The barrier model of productivity growth suggests that individual country productivity is related to the world technology frontier disturbed by national barriers. We offer a country study of the barrier model exploiting the dramatic changes in the linkages to the world economy in South Africa....

We extend an open economy Ramsey model to include the technology gap to the world technology frontier. The setting is a middle income country with productivity growth driven by technology adoption and foreign capital goods stimulating spillover and catching up. The interaction of technology...

The relationship between foreign trade openness and growth is a challenge for economic analysis. Econometric approaches struggle with endogeneity of foreign trade and trade policy and endogenous interaction between investment and productivity. We offer an alternative route to identification and...

This paper develops a growth theory that accounts for the evolution of trade policy, underlying internal class conflicts, and global income divergence over the last few centuries. By analyzing political responses to the distributional effects of international trade, this paper finds a prominent...

This paper develops a growth theory that accounts for the evolution of trade policy, underlying internal class conflicts, and global income divergence over the last few centuries. By analyzing political responses to the distributional effects of international trade, this paper finds a prominent...

The economic slowdown experienced in Colombia since 1980 is explained by the structural stagnation of the national economy and the escalation of violence associated with the expansion of drug trafficking. The available data do not reject this hypothesis. The article sustains that...

The significant change in South Africa’s trade patterns over the past two decades should affect the impact of shocks in the rest of the world on the country, since South Africa is a small open economy. We investigate the effect with the use of a global vector autoregression (GVAR) model from...

This paper estimates the effect of trade liberalization on growth, using plant-level data from Switzerland. We employ a natural experiment framework to quantify the effect of a bundle of treaties liberalizing trade between Switzerland and the EU enacted in June 2002 ("Bilateral Agreements I") on...