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...

Real GDP tends to underestimate the increase in real domestic value added, real GDI, and welfare when the terms of trade improve. An improvement in the terms of trade is similar to a technological progress. The national accounts treat the two phenomena very unevenly, however, with a change in...

This paper uses a general equilibrium trade framework to estimate the contribution of transport infrastructure to regional development. I apply the analysis to India, a country with a notoriously weak and congested transportation infrastructure. I first analyze the development effects of a...

Almost 80 percent of capital goods production in the world is concentrated in 10 countries. Poor countries import most of their capital goods. We argue that international trade in capital goods has quantitatively important effects on economic development through two channels: (i) capital...

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...

This paper identifies the major factors explaining GDP growth in a number of South-East Asian countries during the eighties and early nineties. Estimates of the contribution of technological change, increases in the endowments of labor and capital, movements in the terms of trade, and changes in...

We develop a tractable growth model to study the dynamic macroeconomic effects of multinational production (MP) across countries. In this model, MP is the vehicle of international idea diffusion: when firms produce in a foreign country, they contribute to the local stock of knowledge. We...

Does trade improve institutions and contribute to long run growth? I develop a theory of trade, in which trade liberalization provides incentive to change institutions in two ways. On the one hand, trade leads to specialization according to comparative advantage, expanding the industries that do...

There has been a growing concern of developing industrial clusters in developed nations and emerging economies in the past two decades to strengthen economic growth and development. The concept of properly organised industrial clusters has not yet been heavily implemented in developing nations,...

Because of its inappropriability, protection of property rights is widely recognized as being the state's responsibility. Moreover, recent empirical evidence suggests that it leads to higher investment levels and faster growth. Nevertheless, the extent of property rights protection differs...