This paper seeks to gain insights into whether developing countries benefit more from the backwardness advantage for economic growth in the Information Age. The paper examines this concern through three complementary approaches. First, it derives theoretical grounds from the existing economic...

Between 1820 and 1990, the share of world income going to today's wealthy nations soared from twenty percent to almost seventy. Since then, that share has plummeted to where it was in 1900. As Richard Baldwin explains, this reversal of fortune reflects a new age of globalization that is...

The paper offers some reflections on the convergence of productivity in the United States and Europe, which essentially stopped in the 1990s. It argues that the barriers preventing further convergence in the early 1990s were removed subsequently. But since then trends in productivity growth have...

Between 1820 and 1990, the share of world income going to today’s wealthy nations soared from twenty percent to almost seventy. Since then, that share has plummeted to where it was in 1900. As Richard Baldwin explains, this reversal of fortune reflects a new age of globalization that is...

At a time when the forces of globalization and automation face a backlash in large parts of the developed world for their role in displacing jobs and spurring inequality and as movies figuring dystopian futures with robots dominating the future gain traction, the book The Great Convergence:...

This paper considers the implications for developing countries of a new wave of technological change that substitutes pervasively for labor. It makes simple and plausible assumptions: the AI revolution can be modeled as an increase in productivity of a distinct type of capital that substitutes...