The authors investigate the relationship between weak growth performance and low investment rates in Africa. The cross-country evidence suggests no direct relationship. The positive and significant coefficient on private investment appears to be driven by Botswana's presence in the sample....

Total factor productivity has been low in most Sub-Saharan Africa. It is often said that the binding constraint on African industrial development is the inadequate supply of technologically capable workers. And many cross-country studies imply that the low level of human capital in Africa is an...

Developed-country purchasers of exports from developing-country industrial firms have often provided considerable technical aid to the exporting firms. Some question the benefits to both OECD and developing country firms of such transfers. The authors developed a model to analyze the...

In the past 35 years, China, Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan (China) have transformed themselves from technologically backwards and poor economies to relatively modern, affluent economies. Each has experienced more than a fourfold increase in per capita income. In each, a significant...

Do flexible labor markets lubricate growth? Using data from Taiwan, China, to analyze the effects of labor market flexibility, the authors find that: 1) Workers are more likely to move to industries that tend to be similar to their industry of origin (including intrasectoral moves that would be...

This paper analyzes the structural relationship between policies that distort resource allocation and long-term growth. It briefly reviews the Solow model in which steady-state growth depends only on exogenous technological change, but finds it unsatisfactory as a model of long-term growth. The...

To study the adjustment to the debt crisis, this paper compares the experience of seven"crisis"debtor countries with those of five"noncrisis"debtor countries. In response to a sharp reduction in external capital flows, the crisis countries rescheduled their debt during 1982-87. The noncrisis...

This paper explores the broad themes of the literature on economic growth. It makesthe following two broad conclusions. First, it notes that the efficiency of investment is as important as the level of investment in determining growth performance. Secondly, it states that keeping to a minimum...

As governments grow richer, the share of their GDP devoted to public spending rises. Public spending in the United States was 7.5 percent of GDP in 1913. It is 33 percent today. Although industrial countries spend twice as much as developing countries, government spending on goods and services...

Noting that South Africa may be one of the few African countries that could contribute to mitigating climate change, the authors explore the impact of a carbon tax relative to alternative energy taxes on economic welfare. Using a disaggregate general-equilibrium model of the South African...