We consider three objects of people's status preference, consumption, physical capital holding and money holding, and show that an economy grows or stagnates depending on which object people most seriously take as status. If the main object of status preference is consumption, a steady state...

Market competition is central to innovative activity, the diffusion process and macro-economic productivity growth. Productivity growth at all levels comes about through institutional reconfiguration in response to the ongoing market process. Stable and sustained long-term growth in output...

This paper links the two fields of 'development traps' and 'brain drain'. We construct a model which integrates endogenous international migration into a simple growth model. As a result the dynamics of the economy can feature some underdevelopment traps: an economy starting with a low level of...

Persistent low fertility rates lead to lower population growth rates and eventually also to decreasing population sizes in most industrialized countries. There are fears that this demographic development is associated with declines in per capita GDP and possibly also increasing inequality of the...

This paper analyzes in a unified framework of a Lewis-Solow growth model the prospects for economic development of low income countries (LIC) as well as the possibility of being caught in a poverty trap and falling behind. By focussing on a technologically backward and stagnating LIC, it is...

The Macroeconomic Aid Effectiveness Literature (Macro AEL) has had a resounding effect both within the academic community and within the policy arena where its policy recommendations carry substantial weight. Although the empirical aspect of this literature has received substantial scrutiny, the...

Summary The rise of the East-German economy in the 1950s and 1960s and its decline in the 1970s and 1980s is difficult to explain by neoclassical economics. However; the observed life cycle may be explained by the inclusion of concepts from old and new institutional economics and from functional...