For the past nearly forty years, China has experienced average annual real GDP growth of close to ten percent, much of it driven by investment and capital accumulation. By 2014, gross capital formation had reached 46 percent of aggregate expenditures. This paper documents the role of investment...

Capital estimates are widely used in economic growth and productivity studies, for profitability considerations and wealth accounting exercises. Yet the calculation of “capital” frequently receives only cursory attention, despite the challenges posed by conceptual difficulties, the...

Capital estimates are widely used in economic growth and productivity studies, for profitability considerations and wealth accounting exercises. Yet the calculation of “capital” frequently receives only cursory attention, despite the challenges posed by conceptual difficulties, the...

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Belize grew faster than its regional peers. By the mid-2000s, however, economic growth had slowed down to the regional average. A vicious circle of low growth and increasing public debt has been clouding Belize's outlook. This paper applies a growth diagnostic...

We present a theoretical argument to identify the conditions under which a firm prefers to invest in factor saving innovations rather than neutral innovations. We prove that incentives to invest in factor saving innovations positively depend on i) total factor productivity and ii) the scarcity...

China's rapid economic growth over the past forty years was in good part driven by capital accumulation, with, in recent years, investment taking up almost half of output. This paper documents the role of investment in driving economic growth in China, questions how much longer China can sustain...

In the euro area, there is mixed evidence that the GDP per capita of lower-income economies has been catching up with that of higher-income economies since the start of monetary union. The significant real convergence performance of some of the most recent members contrasts with that of the...

The present System of National Accounts (SNA93) treats durable consumption goods as consumption goods rather than investment although rentals for owner occupied households is imputed into GDP. We argue that households de facto treat the purchase of durable goods as investments and thus, the...

Over the past decades ASEAN countries have experienced rapid economic growth accompanied by a dramatic fall in poverty rates, but income inequality has not retreated. This research aims at identifying factors which could contribute to more equally distributed growth in ASEAN. To measure...

We build a two-country currency union DSGE model with endogenous growth to assess the role of cross-country differences in product and labor market regulations for long-term growth and for the adjustment to shocks. We show that with endogenous growth, there is no reason to expect real income...