Following Solow's (2001) recent advice, this paper takes productivity as the left-hand-side variable and offers a cross-country analysis of its determinants. The analysis follows the two-stage methodology, the first of which is devoted to obtaining productivity estimates, and the second stage is...

As at today, it is an indisputable fact that the climate is changing and there is a scientific consensus that the world is becoming a warmer place principally attributable to human activities. Regrettably, the physical impacts of future climate change on humans and the environment will include...

This article reassesses the classic period of Import-Substituting Industrialisation (ISI) in Brazil between 1945 and 1979. New data presented here show that Brazilian industry achieved significant labour productivity growth during the post-war years and became more technologically sophisticated,...

In an influential paper Mankiw, Romer, and Weil (1992) argue that the evidence on the international disparity in levels of per capita income and rates of growth is consistent with a standard Solow model, once it has been augmented to include human capital as an accumulable factor. In a study on...

This paper investigates firm-level dynamics of labour productivity in China's manufacturing sector over the 1998-2007. Underlying the aggregate evidence of dramatic growth of labour productivity, one observes a large, even if shrinking, intra-sectoral heterogeneity. A major process of both...

The growth of agricultural productivity is widely believed to be low. But this study finds the productivity growth rate in agriculture to be higher than that in manufacturing, both on average and for groups of countries at different stages of development. This suggests that a large agricultural...

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....

In this paper we study the efficiency and total factor productivity growth of Italian regions by implementing a bootstrap Data Envelopment Analysis method. This approach allows us to perform a sensitivity analysis of the efficiency scores at regional level, in which human capital is included...

Much of the debate over income convergence hinges on whether technology diffusion is “global” or “local”. In this paper, I address this question in a developing country setting and focus on the role of major research clusters in promoting domestic technology diffusion. I identify four de...

Previous research has argued that foreign direct investment (FDI) exerts a positive and causal impact on the productivity of the recipient countries. However, we find that there is little macroeconomic evidence that FDI fosters productivity growth in recipient countries, including in those with...