For many developing countries, international transfers are now a significant source of income. These transfers include official development aid, private charitable donations, and personal remittances. This paper uses dynamic one-sector and multi-sector models to isolate conditions under which...

The CES production function is increasingly prominent in macroeconomics and growth economics. This paper distinguishes between different uses of “normalized” CES functions, an approach that has become popular in the literature. The results of Klump and La Grandville (2000) provide a simple...

This paper addresses recent explanations for the East Asian miracle. The argument that growth is entirely due to the accumulation of inputs is assessed and found wanting. There is still a place for the view that attributes success to activist policy. This is especially so, since the other...

The conventional wisdom is that postwar economic growth has been unpredictable. In the 1960s few observers accurately forecast which countries would grow quickly. In this paper we show that indexes of social development constructed in the early 1960s have considerable predictive power. These...

The remarkable economic success of the United States in the 1990s led many observers to talk about a 'New Economy'. This paper provides an overview of the main issues, including faster productivity growth, the stability of inflation despite very low unemployment, the reduction in output...

Rigorous approaches to aggregation indicate that aggregate production functions do not exist except in unlikely special cases. This paper considers the awkward implications for growth economics. It provides a conventional defence of growth theory in terms of 'parables' and then considers how...

This paper investigates the correlation between equipment investment and economic growth, and its compatibility with the Solow growth model. The paper improves on previous work by starting from an explicit theoretical model, using recent data on human capital, taking a rigorous approach to...

Observable variables capturing initial conditions can account for well over half of the variation in developing country growth rates. This paper investigates their role in explaining Africa's recent economic history. Should the origins of slow growth be traced to Africa's social arrangements,...

This paper introduces a framework for studying the optimal dynamic allocation of foreign aid among multiple recipients. We pose the problem as one of weighted global welfare maximization. A donor in the North chooses an optimal path for international transfers, anticipating that consumption and...