The paper's background is a revival of the historically dominant narrative on the large-scale and plantation farming (LSF and PF) in Africa, in reaction to the contemporary phenomenon of 'land grabbing'. The historical antecedents of this narrative are examined and its central contentions - that...

This paper explores the robustness of the Balassa-Samuelson (BS) hypothesis. We analyze a panel of OECD countries from 1970 to 2008 and compare three different datasets on sectoral productivity, including a newly constructed database on total factor productivity. Overall, our DOLS estimation...

This paper uses a 'new open economy macroeconomics' model to study the effect of a productivity shock on exchange rate dynamics. The special features of the model are that households' preferences exhibit a 'catching up with the Joneses' effect and that international financial markets are...

The issue of whether government capital is productive has received a great deal of recent attention. Yet, empirical analyses of public capital productivity have been limited to a small sample of countries for which official capital stock estimates are available. Building on a new database that...

We estimate international technology spillovers to U.S. manufacturing firms via imports and foreign direct investment (FDI) between the years of 1987 and 1996. In contrast to earlier work, our results suggest that FDI leads to substantial productivity gains for domestic firms. The size of FDI...

Learning-by-exporting proponents argue that exporting increases productivity by exposing producers to new technologies or through product quality upgrading. This study is based on the observation that the technological superiority and severity of product quality requirements are not the same in...