This paper analyzes how political institutions, wealth distribution and economic activities affect each other during the process of development. A simple general equilibrium model of rent-seeking political elites with two productive sectors (modern and traditional) is presented.

We consider an economy where property rights are necessary to ensure sufficient rewards to ex ante investments. Because enforcement of property rights influences the ex post distribution of rents there is room for corruption. We characterize the optimal organization of society and the optimal...

This paper studies the mechanisms underlying the apparent stability of the income distribution in Taiwan. An original decomposition methodology based on micro-simulation techniques is proposed. Applied to the distribution of income in Taiwan since 1979 it permits isolating the respective impact...

There is increasing empirical evidence that creative destruction, driven by experimentation and the adoption of new products and processes when investment is sunk, is a core mechanism of development. Obstacles to this process are likely to be obstacles to the progress in standards of living....

This paper provides a short survey of the recent theoretical and the empirical literature on the existence of a negative relationship between economic inequality on one hand, and growth or economic development on the other. The emphasis of the paper is on the lessons to be drawn from these...

In this paper we present an optimal growth model with convex-concave technology, for an open developing country. The latter may choose to produce consumption goods by borrowing on capital markets. We prove there exists two non trivial steady states. An optimal path converges either to 0 or to...

This paper presents a simple model of the links between education, democratization and economic developmnet. In a context of imperfect capital markets, we investigate the incentives for a capitalist oligarchy to subsidize the education of poor workers and to initiate a political transition.

We address the issue of social distribution of an aggregate risk (on agricultural export price), in a macro-economic perspective. Individual incomes in representative social groups are computed as a function of export prices, which are assumed to be stochastic, using an applied general...