The results of this paper challenge the conventional wisdom in the literature that productivity plays no role in the economic development of Singapore. Properly accounting for market power and returns to scale technology, the estimated average productivity growth is twice as large as the...

The 1990s have seen renewed interest in themes of economic growth and development. This is a welcome change after a decade and a half during which macroeconomics was dominated by a concern with short-term adjustment and stabilization issues -- and basic problems of growth, capital accumulation,...

Lederman and Maloney examine the empirical relationships between trade structure and economic growth, particularly the influence of natural resource abundance, export concentration, and intra-industry trade. They test the robustness of these relationships across proxies, control variables, and...

This paper presents a framework for measuring how the structure of taxation and government spending affect output growth. It is shown that when countries are not following a steady-state growth path, static and dynamic distortions will affect output growth. In particular, taxes can affect output...

How did the East Asian miracle turn into one of the worst financial crisis of the century? The authors address the question using Malaysia as a case study. Many discussions of the East Asian crisis address proximate and short-run causes of the crisis, such as the current account deficit,...

The authors examine the growth and convergence of total factor productivity in agriculture and manufacturing in a large sample of countries spanning many levels of development over the period 1967-1992. There is a widely held but rarely tested view that the rate of growth in agricultural...

This paper analyzes the structural relationship between policies that distort resource allocation and long-term growth. It briefly reviews the Solow model in which steady-state growth depends only on exogenous technological change, but finds it unsatisfactory as a model of long-term growth. The...

In recent years, economists have developed new models of endogenous economic growth that consider policy influences on growth and divergent outcomes among countries. These models deal with such issues as growth, the operation of financial markets, trade policy, government expenditures, and...

Most models of economic growth are infinite horizon models that neglect the role of human capital in shaping life-cycle variables. This paper introduces training decisions in a life-cycle model to study the role of human capital both in life-cycle behavior and as an engine of growth. The crucial...

Using standard statistical growth analysis, the author shows that Pakistan's growth is the result of: (a) rapid capital accumulation. Pakistan's investment rate was relatively low but its fixed investment rate grew steadily in the 1970s, stabilizing at about 17 percent of the Gross Domestic...