Within the fundamental determinants of cross-country income inequality, ‘humanly devised' political institutions represent a hallmark factor that societies can influence, as opposed to, for example, geography. Focusing on the portion of inequality explainable by differences in political...

We construct and estimate a unified model combining three of the main sources of cross-country income disparities: differences in factor endowments, barriers to technology adoption and the inappropriateness of frontier technologies to local conditions. The key components are different types of...

Empirical tests in the 1990s found little evidence of poor countries catching up with rich - unconditional convergence - since the 1960s, and divergence over longer periods. This stylized fact spurred several developments in growth theory, including AK models, poverty trap models, and the...

We construct and estimate a unified model combining three of the main sources of cross-country income disparities: differences in factor endowments, barriers to technology adoption and the inappropriateness of frontier technologies to local conditions. The key components are different types of...

The author has recently, defining a catch-up index, growth as catching-up, and deriving an equation for years for absolute convergence, shown Sub-Saharan Africa has fallen behind sharply and, even considering India's population-weight, South Asia has barely shown any growth since 1951 (growing...

Short AbstractUsing the new PWT, that for the first time permit income comparisons overtime too, and defining growth for followers as catching-up, the developing world (excluding China and one or two countries) consisting of 99/100 countries with 3.9/4.0b. population has not shown any growth...

We explore the potential roles of industrial policy in the transition from middle-income to high-income status, and the actual experience of industrial policy in emerging economies. Guided by the conceptual framework of the neo-Schumpeterian approach, we look at industrial policy in the context...

This paper empirically assesses the role of structural and institutional reforms in driving productivity growth across countries at different stages of development, using a distance-to-frontier framework. It gauges whether particular policies and reforms matter more for increasing productivity...

This paper explores the impact of foreign aid on economic growth using variation in aid inflows from natural disasters. Because using a country's own disaster exposure as an instrument for aid inflows violates exogeneity assumptions, I instead use the disaster exposure of a country's "aid...