Latin American countries have lost competitiveness in world markets in comparison to China over the last two decades. The main purpose of this study is to examine the causes of this development. To this end an augmented Dornbusch-type Ricardian' model is estimated using panel data. The...

Do high levels of human capital foster economic growth by facilitating technology adoption? If so, countries with more human capital should have adopted more rapidly the skilled-labor augmenting technologies becoming available since the 1970’s. High human capital levels should therefore have...

We reconsider the effects of long-run economic growth on relative factor prices across cones of specialization. We model economic growth as exogenous technical change. Allowing for capital biased technical change with a sector bias and for endogenous commodity prices, we find that economic...

The costs of import substitution (IS) as a strategy for industrialization, which was deemed synonymous with economic development by many development economists of the fifties and sixties, were shown to be substantial in the influential and nuanced studies of the seventies and eighties under the...

We reconsider the effects of long-run economic growth on relative factor prices across cones of specialization. We model economic growth as exogenous technical change. Allowing for capital biased technical change with a sector bias and for endogenous commodity prices, we find that economic...

While trade integration is often regarded as a principal determinant of economic growth, the empirical evidence for a causal linkage between trade and growth is ambiguous. This paper argues that the effect of trade in dynamic panel estimations depends crucially on the specification of trade....

The role of regulatory quality as one of the so-called deep determinants of growth has emerged as an important issue in economic research in the past 20 years. The positive or negative growth effects of a countryś regulatory framework are amplified by economic integration, which makes factors...

This paper examines the cross-country income and welfare consequences of trade-induced human capital (dis-)accumulation. The model is based on heterogeneous workers who make educational decisions in the presence of complete markets. When such heterogeneous workers invest in schooling, high type...

This work shows the asymmetric effect of the reduction in transportation costs across different sectors in the process of the Great Divergence. Specifically, the analysis indicates that reductions in transportation costs of industrial goods enhance convergence of the growth rates of trading...

We undertake a trade-growth accounting exercise by decomposing data on changes in bilateral international trade flows into their direct (endowment accumulation, productivity growth, changes in trade costs, changing preferences) and indirect components (general equilibrium effects). Furthermore,...