January 1997, Version 1.01 <p>Prepared for the American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings , May 1997. <p>See also "The Productivity of Nations"

Health care extends life. Over the past half century, Americans spent a rising share of total economic resources on health and enjoyed substantially longer lives as a result. Debate on health policy often focuses on limiting the growth of health spending. We investigate an issue central to this...

Per capita income in the richest countries of the world exceeds that in the poorest countries by more than a factor of 50. What explains these enormous differences? This paper returns to several old ideas in development economics and proposes that linkages, complementarity, and superstar effects...

Output per worker varies enormously across countries. Why? Our analysis shows that differences in governmental, cultural, and natural infrastructure are important sources of this variation. According to our results, a high-productivity country (i) has institutions that favor production over...

This brief note revisits the proof of the Steady-State Growth Theorem, first provided by Uzawa (1961). We provide a clear statement of the theorem and a new version of Uzawa's proof that makes the intuition underlying the result more apparent.

This paper studies a growth model that is able to match several key facts of economic history. For thousands of years, the average standard of living seems to have risen very little, despite increases in the level of technology and large increases in the level of the population. Then, after...

Aggregate health expenditures as a share of GDP have risen in the United States from about 5 percent in 1960 to nearly 14 percent in recent years. Why? This paper explores a simple explanation based on technological progress. Medical advances allow diseases to be cured today, at a cost, that...

Output per worker varies enormously across countries. Why? On an accounting basis our analysis shows that differences in physical capital and educational attainment can only partially explain the variation in output per worker-we find a large amount of variation in the level of the Solow...