Nordhaus (2008) has developed a testing strategy for what he calls "Baumol's diseases", by which name he designates a number of by-products of structural change that are unwanted from an economic policy perspective. He finds that the U.S. economy is strongly affected by the "diseases". This...

Since the mid-nineties, U.S. labor productivity outgrows its European counterpart by a wide margin. Several recent studies have found that this result is brought about by relatively few service industries, where productivity growth has accelerated in the U.S., but not so in Europe. Based on this...

Macroeconomic data are indispensable for modern governance, yet it is often unclear how reliable these data are. The production process of macroeconomic data inside the statistical offices is often not very transparent for the general public. Bystanders usually have no choice but to take for...

In a recent paper I argued that Baumol's (1967) model of "unbalanced growth" offers a ready explanation for the observed secular rise in health care expenditure (HCE) in rich countries (HARTWIG 2006). Baumol's model implies that HCE is driven by wage increases in excess of productivity growth. I...

A large body of both theoretical and empirical literature has affirmed a positive impact of human capital accumulation in the form of health on economic growth. Yet Baumol (1967) has presented a model in which imbalances in productivity growth between a "progressive" (manufacturing) sector and a...

The year 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of William J. Baumol’s seminal model of "unbalanced growth", which predicts the so-called "Growth Disease", i.e., the tendency of aggregate productivity growth to slow down in the process of tertiarisation. In an important contribution published in...