In the past sixty years, transistor sizes and weights have decreased by 50 percent every eighteen months, following Moore's Law. Smaller and lighter electronics have increased productivity in virtually every industry and spurred the creation of entirely new sectors of the economy. However, while...

This paper shows that important insights for fiscal policy can be derived from Joseph Schumpeter's academic work. This concerns his fundamental distinction between theories in which the monetary sphere is identical with the real sphere ("real analysis"), and theories in which financial sphere is...

Obtaining reliable data on capital is a recurring challenge when estimating economy-wide productivity growth, especially for developing countries. In this paper I construct energy-based productivity series which use energy consumption instead of capital when making such estimates. I first show...

This paper will create a dynamic economic model where the objective for the government is to maximize economic growth with respect to the available capital in the economy. The amount of capital in the economy is determined by the capitalists in the model which represent the micro foundation in...

Government usually tends to have two options. They can either pursue a tax revenue maximizing strategy or a growth maximizing strategy. The two approached do not necessarily go hand in hand. This paper derives and empirically estimates a simple laissez faire optimal taxation model from the...

The article critically studies the perception that individualistic cultures are more successful from the economic development point of view. The relation has been investigated between Hofstede's IDV dimension and two indicators of economic growth – GDP per capita in current prices and GDP per...

It is no secret that one of the key sources of economic growth is the entrepreneurial activity. But this type of activity is fraught with great risk, which is largely exacerbated by liquidity constraints. This situation is especially relevant for countries with a high level of income inequality,...

An informal model is described that leads to multiple macroeconomic equilibria as a consequence of random variation in the relative amounts of technological change for new and existing goods. The novel observation is that the rate of introduction and market penetration of new goods vis-a-vis...

After a long period of catch-up growth that began after the Second World War, France has now reached a technological frontier in many sectors of its economy. Why is it then that the French economy ranks so low in various rankings of the world's most innovative economies? Why is it so difficult...

Empirical data is presented suggesting that high private and, to a lesser extent, public debt levels place a strong drag upon economic growth. A simple, demand-based, cash flow (DBCF) model of the economy is developed, separating out flows by marginal propensity to spend. This approach is both...