policy watch infrastructure investment and economic growth in the late 1980s david aschauer 1989 triggered a long overdue dialogue among economists and political leaders when he published a study arguing that much of the decline in u s productivity that occurred in the 1970s was precipitated by declining rates of public capital investment my own work confirmed these results munnell 1990a spending advocates seized on these findings as support for increased public investment the enthusiasm among policymakers for the early aschauer results was matched if not surpassed by skepticism on the part of many economists critics of these studies charged that the methodology was flawed that the direction of causation between public investment and output growth is unclear and that even if the historical empirical relationships were estimated correctly they provide no clear indications for current policy who s right what do we know and not know about the link between public infrastructure and productivity and what are the implications of these results for policy

government capital and the production function for u s private output abstract theoretical and policy discussions make unsupported assumptions about the productivity of capital which governments own estimates of an aggregate production function for u s private business 1949 1973 show government capital to be significant statistically and in economic terms

monetary policy matters abstract this paper addresses hoover and perez s comments on our 1989 paper we first show that the estimated impact of monetary policy shifts remains large and ranges from marginally to strongly significant when oil shocks are controlled for we then extend our previous work by expanding the sample period and identifying an additional policy shift in december 1988 with this extension the estimated effects of monetary policy shifts are large and highly significant for all reasonable specifications of oil shocks we also demonstrate that hoover and perez s other objections have little bearing on our conclusions

the role of public capital in production the impact of the stock of public capital on costs of production in the private sector is examined using annual data over the period 1958 89 a translog cost function is estimated and public capital is found to be a significant input the estimates indicate that public capital has positive marginal product and that private and public capital are complements in production rather than substitutes copyright 1992 by mit press

the public capital stock needs trends and performance the condition of america s roads bridges mass transit systems and water and sewer facilities has become an issue of increasing controversy one view holds that deterioration of this public infrastructure capital has reached alarming proportions and that a significant fraction of future national savings will be needed to reverse the damage of past neglect another view argues that there has been no sudden acceleration of decay in capital stock performance that better facility management can often substitute for capital investment and that attempts to greatly increase the size and condition of the public capital stock would place unsustainable pressure on financial markets state and local government budgets and the federal system of grants in aid how extensive is the capital infrastructure problem how did it arise given the many federal government subsidies available for state local capital expenditure how much of the national capacity for capital formation should be allocated to solving the problem if there is a divergence between actual and desired infrastructure capital can the gap be closed without disrupting the growth of other sectors and governmental objectives these questions are unfortunately much easier to pose than to answer there is only limited information about the size and condition of the stock of public infrastructure capital and much of the available information has been assembled from the perspective of engineering or planning needs standards needs assessments typically indicate the fraction of the infrastructure stock that falls below a specified and somewhat arbitrary level of performance or indicate how much spending would be required to bring the existing stock up to the specified standard while sometimes appropriate as a management tool infrastructure needs estimates are formulated in isolation from other public and private capital needs and are thus ill suited to the policy debate over national priorities despite significant data problems some general conclusions about the infrastructure dilemma are possible as a backdrop for these conclusions the first section of this paper presents an overview of the historical trends in public sector capital formation and infrastructure condition the following section discusses the factors shaping these trends with particular attention to the supply and demand components of the capital spending decision we then consider the question of whether existing trends will insure an adequate supply of public capital and address the issue of whether a reduced quantity and quality of infrastructure capital may be expected to reduce private sector productivity growth

intertemporal analysis of state and local government spending theory ad tests abstract do state and local governments smooth their consumption spending across years or is their spending driven mainly by contemporaneous changes in resources we design a test to determine which view of state and local spending is more consistent with the data we find that state and local spending is determined primarily by current as opposed to permanent resources that is despite their apparent ability to skirt balanced budget laws states and localities do not typically smooth their expenditures over time

capital budgets borrowing rules and state capital spending abstract this paper compares the level and composition of government spending in u s states that maintain separate budgets for capital and operating expenditures with that in states that employ unified budgets it also investigates the effects of pay as you go financing rules for capital projects the empirical findings suggest that states with separate capital budgets spend more on public capital projects than comparable states with unified budgets there is no evidence that the presence or absence of a capital budget affects the level of non capital spending pay as you go requirements for financing capital projects are associated with lower levels of both capital and non capital spending

state responses to fiscal crises the effects of budgetary institutions and politics this paper explores the dynamics of state taxes and spending during the late 1980s when regional economic downturns and increased expenditure demands led to substantial state budget deficits more restrictive state fiscal institutions such as no deficit carryover rules and tax and expenditure limitations are correlated with more rapid fiscal adjustment to unexpected deficits political factors are also important when a single party controls the state house and the governorship deficit adjustment is much faster than when party control is divided in gubernatorial election years tax increases and spending cuts are both significantly smaller than at other times

congestion function specification and the publicness of local public goods abstract this paper is about the measurement of congestion within the median voter demand framework the model of congestion traditionally used in the literature and four others are compared and tested in a median voter framework the results show that a more flexible functional form which imposes fewer a priori restrictions on the data does at least as good a job of explaining variations in local government expenditures furthermore it is shown that measured publicness of local public goods depends entirely on the a priori restrictions imposed on the congestion function

the electoral budget cycle on municipal waste collection expenditure abstractthis article analyses the determinants of municipal waste collection expenditure specifically the effects of electoral cycles on municipal waste collection expenditure we use a database with information on spanish municipalities with more than 1000 inhabitants for the period 2002 2011 our results reveal that incumbents adopt an opportunistic behaviour increasing spending on waste in the preelection year and reducing it in the election and post election years therefore we confirm an electoral budget cycle on waste collection expenditures in spain additionally we find that the levels of income unemployment and upper level governments transfers have a positive impact on waste collection spending finally population density level of urbanization average age of the population of the municipality and less fragmented governments negatively influence waste collection spending

business cycle models aggregation and real wage cyclicality a substantial literature has developed to estimate the true cyclicality of real wages that is composition bias free two major issues are addressed in this article aggregation of heterogeneous workers and potential bias in the measurement of the labor input a general analysis of the biases is presented and alternative approaches in the literature are nested in a single framework estimates based on an efficiency units concept that avoids the usual aggregation problems are presented composition bias underestimates the usual parameters of interest unless both the price and the quantity of the labor input are adjusted appropriately

productivity change in state and local governments a model is developed in this paper which allows the growth rate of public sector productivity to be estimated without an explicit measure of sectoral output in this model communities are regarded as generalized households and the goods and services provided by the community s government are interpreted as internally produced household goods the model is then fitted to quarterly data from the u s national income and product accounts and the rate of productivity change is found to average 0 50 per year for the period 1959 1979 the sources of growth approach to productivity measurement distinguishes between the growth in real output due to the growth in factor inputs capital labor materials and the growth in output due to advances in technology managerial practice and other factors related to productive efficiency the former are collectively associated with the movement along an aggregate or sectoral production function while the latter are associated with the shift in that function 2 in practice the shift in the production function is measured by the residual real output not attributed to the growth of the share weighted inputs and termed total factor productivity the sources of growth model is based on the underlying assumption that real output and real input can be measured with a reasonable degree of accuracy while this presumption is correct for many types of economic activity it is essentially incorrect for those sectors which produce services as kendrick 1982 has recently noted approximately one third of the real gross product originating in the service sector of u s private business economy is estimated using employment manhours or labor earnings such procedures systematically misstate the true growth of real output and thus systematically bias the estimated growth in total factor productivity the situation is even worse in the public sector in the u s national income and product accounts the output of general government is defined to be equal to labor input implying that the growth of total factor productivity exactly offsets the effect of nonlabor inputs a model is developed in this paper which allows the growth rate of public sector productivity to be estimated without an explicit measure of sectoral output in this model communities are regarded as generalized households and the goods and services provided by the community s government are interpreted as internally produced household goods this interpretation allows us to appropriate the analytical apparatus of the household production model and thereby permits us to estimate the key parameters of the model including a government total factor productivity parameter without first having to measure the output of the govern

government capital and private output in the united states additional evidence abstract aggregate production functions for private output are estimated from annual u s data for the period 1948 1985 the estimates indicate government capital has an important positive effect on private output the effect of state and local governments capital is large and significant whereas the effect of federal capital appears small and statistically insignificant

infrastructure investment a review essay economists try not to be faddists but they often cannot help themselves while work on a topic should mirror the prospective importance of the topic that situation seems to occur with disappointing frequency instead the usual pattern is that some reasonably important topic will be totally ignored for the longest time then recognized and then the subject of a flurry of work all out of proportion to its likely long run importance nowhere has this speculative bubble of economic research been more clearly illustrated than with infrastructure investment macroeconomists havelong felt that the stock of public capital is an important factor input in the production of total output macroeconomists have known that u s productivity growth slowed dramatically in about 1973 and macroeconomists should have known that united states investment in public capital has been down since the late 1960s yet analysis of the u s productivity slowdown completely ignored infrastructure investment for the first fifteen years of this slowdown concentrating instead on energy prices social regulation the composition of the work force research and development different rates of obsolescence of the private capital stock and any number of other matters the public capital stock was hardly ever even mentioned as a potential factor in the productivity slowdown aschauer changed all that he wrote a series of papers 1989a 1989b 1989c that put these two movements together econometrically infrastructure investment turned down and aggregate productivity turned down slightly later both in the united states and in some other developed countries his work hit the magic button those who had worried about the productivity puzzle for fifteen years welcomed a new suspect those who were worried about low rates of u s national saving welcomed a new way to make their argument even more forcefully than with official figures on saving and investment which do not count infrastructure investment as investment political liberals and liberal politicians saw a way to rescue government spending and projects from the assaults of reaganism and even a way to avoid oth

public capital and the factor intensity of the manufacturing sector numerous studies have examined the effect of local fiscal policy on business activity few have emphasised local public services and fewer still have examined the effect of local fiscal policy on the composition of business activity using newly derived estimates of regional public infrastructure the effect of public capital on the factor intensity of the manufacturing sector of 36 smsas during the 1970 78 period is examined the findings of this study indicate that public investment can play an important role in determining the composition of a region s industrial sector

public capital and total factor productivity this paper examines the impact of the stock of public capital on output levels and productivity growth rates in the united states the analysis is based on the estimation of parameters in a translog profit function prices of intermediate goods are introduced into a quasiproduction function for value added recently developed econometric techniques for dealing with nonstationary time series are used in the estimation the authors find that the services of public capital are an important part of the production process and that about 40 percent of the productivity decline is explained by a fall in the public capital labor ratio copyright 1993 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

on the generic nonoptimality of dominant strategy allocation mechanisms a general theorem that includes pure exchange economies it is shown that if an economy s participants cannot be separated into groups across which there are no potentially conflicting interests i e if the economy is indecomposable then every continuous truth dominant allocation mechanism will attain nonoptimal allocations on an open dense set of preference profiles classical edgeworth box exchange economies economies with no externalities and no production but with arbitrary numbers of consumers and goods as well as economies with public goods and economies with other kinds of externalities are all shown via simple arguments to be indecomposable the results are extended to cover nonrevelation mechanisms copyright 1990 by the econometric society

does government ideology influence deregulation of product markets empirical evidence from oecd countries this paper examines how government ideology has influenced deregulation of product markets in oecd countries i analyze a dataset of non manufacturing regulation indicators covering energy transport and communication industries in 21 oecd countries over the 1980 2003 period and employ two different indices of government ideology the results suggest that government ideology has had a strong influence on the deregulation process market oriented governments promoted the deregulation of the energy transport and communication industries this finding identifies remarkable differences between leftist and rightwing governments concerning the role of government in the economy and basic elements of political order

economic choice political decision and the problem of limits assesses the arguments for the use of market or political processes for making collective choices the border between what is mine and what is ours is contested but it is unguarded where should it lie how would we know when it should be adjusted i uncover an old paradox a society can never use political means to guard against incursions across the border for political ends some other mechanism such as constitutional or other extra statutory rules are required

self service activities and formal or informal market services household can provide themselves with services in different ways generally a household can produce a service itself or buy it on a formal or informal market on an informal market services are sold at a price substantially lower than on a formal market because of tax evasion by both consumer and producer this article investigates the choices made by dutch households with respect to three services small home repairs car repair and maintenance and ladies hairdressing the analysis shows that the mode of provision of the services is influenced not only by financial considerations but also by the ability of the household to engage in home production skills for and attitudes towards home production and the availability of informal market services in the local area

symposium on the slowdown in productivity growth tthe growth slowdown that began in the late 1960s or early 1970s is the most significant macroeconomic development of the last two decades table 1 presents the basic facts for the big seven members of the oecd the significance of the slowdown derives from the power of compound interest when per capita income is growing at 4 percent it doubles every 18 years when it grows at only 2 percent it doubles every 35 years the permanent income defined as the annuity value of expected income of a 25 year old german citizen basing her expectations of income growth on average performance in the period 1955 73 would be 80 percent above her current income that of a 25 year old basing her expectations on the growth rate of income in the 1973 1986 period would be only 22 percent above her current income equivalently taking a generation as 33 years children in italy who might have expected to start out with a standard of living nearly five times the level at which their parents began would on the basis of the lower output growth from 1973 to 1986 expect to start out at less than double the material standard at which their parents began the four papers in this symposium address the question of the causes of the growth slowdown and to a lesser extent what might be done about it the classic empirical result in this area for which among other results robert solow received the 1987 nobel prize in economic science is that technological progress accounts for about half the growth of per capita output correspondingly most of the growth

the size of human capital externalities cross country evidence human capital accumulation is usually held to generate positive externalities however the empirical evidence on human capital externalities has been scarce and inconclusive the missing evidence appears to be caused by misleading comparisons between private and social rates of return by incorrect interpretations of regression coefficients or by an inappropriate level of aggregation our own estimates point to relatively robust empirical evidence for a human capital externality that is about twice as large as a benchmark estimate which is derived from a standard parameterization of a simple growth model we ponder a possible causal link from human capital to social capital in the context of alternative views of long run development and argue that the grand transition view paldam 2002 is compatible with the existence of a large human capital externality

municipal capital maintenance and fiscal distress this paper formalizes and empirically tests the hypothesis that the deficient maintenance of public infrastructure is caused by fiscal distress the authors utilize a production decision framework in which public officials combine maintenance and new capital to produce a desired level of capital services the behavior implied in the fiscal distress hypothesis is treated as perverse deviations from the optimal production path the empirical findings from cross sectional expenditures data give support to the fiscal distress hypothesis copyright 1991 by mit press

aggregate local public sector investment and shocks norway 1946 1990 local public sector investment is determined in an environment of shifting economic conditions investments are investigated using an intertemporal decision model allowing for tests of forward looking behaviour and adjustments to expected and unexpected shocks the econometric analysis of the aggregate local public sector over the period 1946 1990 indicates that local and county governments are forward looking and have small adjustment costs to investment in a full investment demand model only unexpected changes of gross domestic product and unemployment are shown to be important in the short run the central government has arranged stable revenue growth of the local public sector but greater volatility in macroeconomic conditions has led to fluctuations in local public investment

is public capital really productive a methodological reappraisal abstract we present an evaluation of the main empirical approaches used in the literature to estimate the contribution of public capital stock to growth and private factors productivity based on a simple stochastic general equilibrium model built as to reproduce the main long run relations observed in us post war historical data we show that the production function approach may not be reliable to estimate this contribution our analysis reveals that this approach largely overestimates the public capital elasticity given the presence of a common stochastic trend shared by all non stationary inputs

disentangling the demand function from the production function for local public services the case of public safety abstract in this paper we develop a theoretical framework and an econometric model which allow us to separate the effect of income and other socioeconomic variables on the demand for publicly provided goods from their effect on the price of those goods we apply our approach in a study of expenditures for police protection in a cross section of 73 u s cities and counties our results suggest that studies of public expenditures which fail to incorporate community characteristics in production and cost functions can yield very misleading results

is public expenditure productive abstract this paper considers the relationship between aggregate productivity and stock and flow government spending variables the empirical results indicate that i the nonmilitary public capital stock is dramatically more important in determining productivity than is either the flow of nonmilitary or military spending ii military capital bears little relation to productivity and iii a core infrastructure of streets highways airports mass transit sewers water systems etc has most explanatory power for productivity the paper also suggests an important role for the net public capital stock in the productivity slowdown of the last fifteen years

validation of stated preferences for public goods a comparison of contingent valuation survey response and voting behaviour this study reports the results from an in person comparison of contingent valuation cv survey response and subsequent voting behaviour on comparable propositions to increase public spending for landscape protection a substantial proportion of cv responses were not consistent with self reported actual voting decisions suggesting an upward bias of stated willingness to pay item non response and protest zero bids were more frequently given by those rejecting than those approving the actual proposition self reported actual decisions yielded a more consistent explanatory pattern than did hypothetical choices the official aggregate voting records show that these results cannot be explained simply by errors in self reported votes we conclude that referenda provide a valuable opportunity to test stated preference methods for public goods particularly public goods with significant passive use values however an important requirement is that the stated choices to be compared with the referendum decisions unlike in previous studies come from independent contingent valuation surveys

public capital and private productivity this paper uses three different approaches to investigate whether the declining provision of public capital is a major cause of declining labor productivity the juxtaposition of approaches removes

income tax evasion labour supply and the equity efficiency tradeoff abstract this paper is an attempt to incorporate tax evasion into the analysis of optimum income taxation a model of variable labour supply with tax evasion is used to derive supply functions for labour in regular and irregular markets given taxpayer behaviour the government chooses tax rates penalties and the probability of detection to maximize a utilitarian social welfare function the results consist in the derivation of a formula for the optimum marginal tax rate and a characterization of the factors determining the choice between the penalty rate and the probability of detection as instruments for the control of tax evasion

five questions an integrated research agenda for public choice all societies political or academic must choose among alternatives these choices can be good or bad the worst choice may be looking for answers before there is consensus or at least a debate on what the real questions should be five real questions are offered here in an integrated research agenda for public choice my premis is that there is a single fundamental human problem construct or preserve institutions that make self interested individual action not inconsistent with group welfare all social science research is either a distraction or a step toward understanding at least one of five questions 1 what are preferences 2 what are feasible alternatives 3 how much does the form of implementation affect the way alternatives are valued 4 how do alternatives chosen today affect the menu of alternatives available in the future 5 what is good how would we know if some outcomes are better than others

efficiency adjusted public capital and growth summary this paper constructs an efficiency adjusted public capital stock series and re examines the public capital and growth relationship the paper also examines the effects of four specific stages of the public investment process appraisal selection implementation and evaluation on capital accumulation and growth the results show that public capital is a significant contributor to economic growth the quality of public investment as measured by variables capturing the adequacy of project selection and implementation is statistically significant in explaining variations in economic growth a result mainly driven by low income countries

measuring the contribution of public infrastructure capital in sweden the authors purpose is to examine ways of evaluating and measuring the contribution of public infrastructure capital to private sector output and productivity growth in sweden they do this by specifying and implementing empirically a number of alternative econometric models using annual data for sweden from 1960 to 1988 applying a dual cost function approach they find that increases in public infrastructure capital ceteris paribus reduce private sector costs the authors compute that amount of public infrastructure capital that would rationalize the cost savings incurred by the private business and manufacturing sectors and find that the amount that can be rationalized in this manner is less than what was in fact available in 1988 but that the extent of excess public infrastructure capital has been falling in the 1980s copyright 1992 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

tax policy and economic growth lessons from the 1980s the past seven years of u s economic policy and performance constitute a truly remarkable if confusing experiment few would have guessed in 1980 that inflation would fall rapidly to 4 percent and hold pretty steady during a lengthy recovery that productivity growth would partially rebound the national debt more than double capital imports reach 150 billion in a single year or that employment would continue to expand at rates envied by other advanced economies perhaps fewer still would have predicted two major and two minor tax reforms would be passed in six years a flip flop in depreciation schedules and a top personal tax rate below 30 percent while it is always easier to draw inferences concerning economic growth its determinants and policies affecting the determinants with long historical hindsight this paper will attempt to provide information evaluation and conjecture to draw some tentative lessons about the effects of tax policies in the 1980s on long run economic growth the good news from the 1980s is the remarkable achievement of substantially lower marginal tax rates making the government a much smaller silent partner in many economic decisions for example the tax advantage of debt finance is reduced substantially with the much lower marginal tax rates the bad news is that the nation could not afford all of the good news the very large budget deficits add to the instability in the tax code in addition to whatever other problems they cause moreover in a country with the lowest saving and investment rates in the advanced world the consequence of which may be to decrease our long run growth potential and short run trade competitiveness the remaining anti saving and investment features of our tax law while probably less important in the long run than the u s

public capital maintenance and congestion long run growth and fiscal policies abstract in this paper we study an endogenous growth model in which public maintenance expenditures affect the depreciation rate of public capital and the latter is subject to congestion we find that economies with low congestion in public infrastructure will require a threshold level of public capital maintenance for ongoing growth we also examine the fiscal implications of public capital maintenance policies and we find that the composition of public capital expenditures under congestion is a crucial determinant of optimal and growth maximizing fiscal policies the government can affect the return of public capital by re allocating public expenditures between new public investment and maintenance and hence avoid excessive taxation that is required under increasing congestion

avoiding tax avoidance a repeated game theoretic approach abstract we propose an optimal auditing scheme for the tax authorities who face a given tax and penalty functions and a given budget constraint under our proposed strategy individuals can be classified into one of three groups each group is characterized by two parameters i the probability of being audited in that group and ii into which group will an individual move if ii a he reported truthfully ii b he cheated it is then shown that there is a choice of these parameters so that in equilibrium i e when every individual maximizes his payoff given the auditing strategy the percentage of individuals that cheat is arbitrarily small

explaining differences in productive efficiency an application to belgian municipalities the purpose of this paper is to measure and explain variations in productive efficiency of municipal governments in belgium technical efficiency is evaluated using a non parametric method based on the free disposal hull fdh reference technology we first calculate input output and graph farrell efficiency measures for a cross section of all 589 belgian municipalities in a second stage of the analysis we explain the calculated differences in efficiency in terms of variables related to the structural characteristics of municipalities and to the institutional environment

public infrastructure and productivity growth in greek agriculture recent research has focused on the effect of public infrastructure on economic performance in this paper a model of greek agriculture s technology and behaviour is constructed based on the dual cost function framework the model provides a decomposition of productivity growth into the components technical change returns to scale and public infrastructure the empirical estimates indicate that public infrastructure investment provides a significant return to agriculture and augments productivity growth over the period 1960 1995 the impact of public infrastructure on productivity growth in livestock and crop production is found to be positive although it has been declining since the late 1970s these results strongly suggest that a decline in public infrastructure investment can partly explain the observed decline in the productivity growth of greek agriculture in the 1980s

local government grants and income tax revenue redistributive politics in norway 1900 1990 an important aspect of the welfare state is public provision of private goods primarily education and health care in norway the provision of these services has been organized through the local public sector the development of the welfare state has to a large extent been the development of welfare communes the important revenue sources of the local and county governments grants and income tax revenue have been controlled nationally and the paper addresses the determinants of these revenues during 1900 1990 the approach combines a demand model of local public services emphasizing price and income elasticities with a political economy model of central government ideology and strength the decision making is understood as bargaining between the government and interest groups and the political structure consequently is of importance for the policy outcome the analysis shows how politics matter and the results indicate that a minority coalition government implies 30 more grant and income tax revenue to local and county governments than one party majority in the long run

distribution of transfers and soft budget spending behaviors evidence from italian regions this paper examines empirically the strategic interactions among central and subcentral governments when incomplete information forces the subcentral government to form expectations about the amount of transfers that it will receive from the central one the empirical analysis features a wide array of proxies for transfer expectations and uses an autoregressive modeling technique to estimate them on a sample of 20 italian regions for the 1995 2009 time interval the analysis shows that transfer expectations are a quantitatively important component of local government spending revealing evidence of soft budget spending behavior

what have we learned from three decades of research on the productivity of public capital the last three decades have witnessed a great deal of research effort devoted to measuring the private output elasticity of public capital the wide range of available estimates have precluded any consensus so far however this paper reconciles the empirical findings of the literature by quantitatively analyzing a sample of 578 estimates collected from 68 studies for the 1983 2008 period using meta regression analysis we show how study design characteristics and publication bias can explain a large fraction of the variation across estimates we find a short run output elasticity of public capital supplied at the central government level of 0 083 which increases to 0 122 in the long run if in addition only core infrastructure at a regional local level of government is considered these estimates are almost doubled the average output elasticity of public capital amounts to 0 106 our results suggest that public capital is undersupplied in oecd economies

the productivity slowdown the oil shocks and the real cycle f ive facts stand out about economic performance in the united states since world war ii the first is that for most of the postwar period the u s has had a slower rate of economic growth than the other major developed democracies except great britain and much lower rates of growth than germany japan and italy the gap between the growth of per capita income of the united states and comparable countries has however tended to diminish over time and the united states has lately grown at about the same rate as most other developed countries the second outstanding fact is that the united states has fallen far behind in many mass production industries in which it used to lead the world whereas it is ahead of other nations in many new and especially high technology industries in automobiles steel tires household appliances and earth moving and farm equipment for example u s production has fallen dramatically in relation to output in most comparable countries and the country has become a net importer of most such products by contrast in newer industries such as computers jet aircraft sophisticated weaponry and high technology in general the united states is often dominant both as producer and exporter the third outstanding fact is that most of the older heartland of american industry roughly the area north and east of an arc drawn from baltimore to st louis to milwaukee has declined dramatically in comparison with the south and the west this change in regional fortunes has been due in large part to migration motivated by differences in economic prospects from the declining to the advancing