any non welfarist method of policy assessment violates the pareto principle reply the public at large many policymakers and a number of economists hold views of social welfare that are non welfarist that is they attach some importance to factors other than the effects of policies on individuals utilities we show however that any non welfarist method of policy assessment violates the pareto principle

economic integration efficiency change and technological progress this article examines the forces driving output growth in 21 manufacturing industries at the 3 digit level in hong kong during the period 1976 to 1997 a varying frontier coefficients model is adopted that relaxes the assumption of homogeneous application of the best practice production technology the varying coefficients frontier approach allows the decomposition of output growth into factor contributions technological progress and efficiency change following the decomposition framework it facilitates the investigation of the relative roles of the three components of output growth and of the manner in which technical efficiency changed over time the article finds evidence of moderate annual tfp growth of 2 7 in hong kong manufacturing attributed mainly to technological progress this implies technical efficiency gained through learning by doing has been insignificant reflecting the loss of skilled labour associated with manufacturing relocation to mainland china

productivity growth in goods and services across the heterogeneous states of america i introduction the study of income and productivity convergence and structural transformation are central and recurring themes in economic growth research the u s states have been a fertile testing ground for many intellectual advances in these areas the closed economy assumptions of the underlying models notwithstanding the states offer compensating advantages such as being subject to the same macroeconomic policy while simultaneously exhibiting considerable heterogeneity along many dimensions of interest to growth researchers demographics composition of output quality of workforce tax policy natural resource endowments geography etc at the same time knowledge on multifactor productivity mfp growth which is central to many growth models remains sparse for u s states this is mainly due to lack of data on capital accumulation beyond the manufacturing sector this is unfortunate as an emerging body of work has begun to draw attention to the fact that the convergence of state level incomes has slowed down over the past two to three decades in the absence of adequate data at the state level it becomes difficult to further analyze this problem within a multisectoral framework in this study we seek to rectify this shortcoming by constructing and analyzing productivity growth for the broadly defined privately produced goods and service sectors at the state level and undertake both growth accounting and convergence analysis for the period 1980 2007 1 our primary innovation is the use of the dual growth accounting method which relies on factor prices rather than factor stocks to construct mfp growth to get a sense of the underlying heterogeneity in sectoral labor productivity growth consider the convergence plots displayed in figure 1 in figure 1 a we plot labor productivity growth in the nonfarm nonmining private sector between 1980 and 2007 against initial labor productivity there is some evidence of absolute convergence although weak in figures ib and 1c we repeat similar plots but now for the goods sector and for the private service sector separately here we see markedly different patterns while convergence in the goods sector is apparent for services it is quite the opposite moreover if one inspects the values on the vertical axes one can also infer large differences across states this is particularly true for goods where the difference between oregon or and montana mt was almost 7 annually as a result even though montana had slightly higher labor productivity in 1980 by 2007 oregon s productivity was at least five times higher even for the service sector where the range is much smaller the difference between connecticut ct and michigan mi was almost 2 annually as a result though both states began with almost similar values connecticut s labor productivity in services was 60 higher than michigan s by 2007 clearly these are large underlying regional differences these very different patterns motivate some of the questions that we try to answer in this study using our constructed series of mfp growth and its constituent variables we examine the sources of variations in labor productivity growth first we conduct an in depth growth accounting exercise to explore the relative importance of mfp growth versus factor accumulation for the two broad sectors across u s states this allows us to undertake traditional growth accounting exercises and also examine the sources of variations across states as the dual accounting approach relies on the construction of real wage growth and real user cost growth we also investigate the sectoral patterns for these two variables second we conduct convergence analysis at the sectoral level for labor productivity growth mfp growth as well as factor price growth we show that while the goods sector shows convergence both absolute and conditional on initial human capital we see no such evidence for the service sector

does demographic change matter for growth abstract how important is the demographic transition for economic growth to answer this question this paper constructs a general equilibrium overlapping generations model with endogenous fertility the model is calibrated to data from taiwan a country that experienced rapid economic growth while undergoing significant demographic transition our results suggest that more than one third of the output growth in taiwan during the past four decades can be attributed to demographic transition while tfp growth explains another third and the remainder is mainly due to skill biased technological progress our results show that demographic change is an important driver of the growth process in countries undergoing rapid fertility decline

what explains the industrial revolution in east asia evidence from the factor markets this paper presents dual estimates of total factor productivity growth tfpg for east asian countries while the dual estimates of tfpg for korea and hong kong are similar to the primal estimates they exceed the primal estimates by 1 percent a year for taiwan and by more than 2 percent for singapore the reason for the large discrepancy for singapore is because the return to capital has remained constant despite the high rate of capital accumulation indicated by singapore s national accounts this discrepancy is not explained by financial market controls capital income taxes risk premium changes and public investment subsidies jel o11 o16 o47 o53

the role of trade in structural transformation abstract low agriculture productivity is considered a key obstacle to economic development for many countries international trade in agricultural goods can help overcome this barrier and facilitate structural transformation because it allows countries to import part of their food needs this article quantifies the role of trade in this context through the examples of south korea during the last 50 years and great britain in the 19th century to do the analysis i calibrate and simulate a two sector neoclassical growth model to match the data and perform the policy experiments i find that agricultural imports played a crucial role in the early transformation of great britain while in south korea trade also had a positive impact on its structural transformation but it could have played a much larger role if the country had not introduced agricultural protection policies

oligarchies and development in a global economy a tale of two elites this paper studies how comparative advantage and the political elites endowments shape long run performance in economies with imperfect political institutions the trade regime interacts with industrial policy and regulations on capital mobility in governing capital accumulation in a capital scarce economy capitalist oligarchs striving for import substitution industrialization isi initially shelter the economy from trade while promoting industrial policies that promote total factor productivity growth in the manufacturing sector this gradually shifts the comparative advantage toward manufacturing and renders the economy attractive to foreign investors allowing for trade and foreign capital inflows are thus complementary policies that spur growth in the capital oligarchy by contrast landed oligarchs in a capital scarce economy favor openness to trade at an early stage of development neglect industrial policies and block foreign capital to maximize extractable rents the policy mix causes the economy to stagnate consistent with the experiences of south korea and argentina in the postwar era the model predicts that the success of isi policies depends crucially on the conditions governing the incentives for capital accumulation jel f10 f20 p40 p50 o10 o24

religion and economic performance summary this paper investigates the relationship between religion and economic performance in both cross country and within country regressions the null hypothesis that religious affiliation is uncorrelated with performance can frequently be rejected i e religion matters though the regressions do not yield a robust pattern of coefficients with respect to particular religions the results with respect to islam do not support the notion that it is inimical to growth on the contrary virtually every statistically significant coefficient on muslim population shares reported in this paper in both cross country and within country statistical analyses is positive if anything islam promotes growth

implications of financial crisis for east asian trend growth the article sets the asian financial crisis in the context of the developmental state model of asian development and sees it as in part the downside risk of a financial liberalization that was badly handled but nevertheless appropriate as a stimulus to better productivity performance the east asian economies are shown still to have a large labour productivity gap with the leading oecd countries and substantial scope for further rapid catch up growth historical experience suggests that the policy response to the crisis is fundamental not only to immediate recovery prospects but also to realizing this remaining fast growth potential

the contribution of female health to economic development we analyze the economic consequences for less developed countries of investing in female health we do this through developing and calibrating a novel micro founded dynamic general equilibrium model in which parents trade off the number of children against investments in their education and in which we allow for health related gender differences in productivity we show that better female health speeds up the demographic transition and thereby the take off toward sustained economic growth by contrast male health improvements delay the transition and take off because ceteris paribus they raise fertility investing in female health is therefore a potent lever for promoting development

international status seeking trade and growth leadership we study a two country endogenous growth model where the utility of agents in developing countries is affected by consumption gaps with advanced economies international status seeking tends to revert growth differentials in favour of the developing country preferences with endogenous status desire generate convergence in growth rates in the presence of structural gaps and convergence in income levels if productivity differences disappear this process is driven by declining terms of trade and faster capital accumulation of the status seeker the model predictions are shown to be consistent with the stylized facts that characterized the growth performance of east asian economies

total factor productivity differences appropriate technology vs efficiency abstract recent development and growth accounting studies have established that total factor productivity is an important source of cross country differences in income levels and growth rates this paper makes two contributions first it examines the sensitivity of the development accounting results to the cobb douglas specification of the production function second within the cobb douglas framework it weighs evidence of the two alternative explanations of total factor productivity differences the inefficiency view and the appropriate technology view to accomplish these tasks the world production frontier is estimated using a nonparametric deterministic approach known as data envelopment analysis i find that the fraction of income differences explained by physical and human capital increases from 32 to 55 when departing from the cobb douglas assumption there is also evidence consistent with the appropriate technology view countries with an inadequate mix of inputs are unable to access the most productive technologies moreover the world technology frontier appears to be shifting out faster at input combinations close to that of the rd it explains 43 of output variation in 1995 and its importance has increased over time

pareto principles from inch to ell abstract under mild conditions including the possibility of compensation by monetary transfer this paper shows that all versions of the pareto principle viz the pareto indifference the weak pareto the strong pareto and the full pareto are in fact mutually equivalent

the non equivalence of tariffs and quantity restraints as rent shifting policies in a differentiated oligopoly with quantity as the strategic variable an optimal tariff can lead to a welfare gain when a quantity restraint is used instead this gain can be offset since the quota induces anticompetitive effects however alternative quantity restraints such as import quotas or voluntary export restraints whether specified in volume or ratio form will influence the strength of the anticompetitive effect in this paper the authors evaluate empirically the degree of nonequivalence between alternative trade instruments and the factors that likely influence it

any non welfarist method of policy assessment violates the pareto principle a comment in a recent article kaplow and shavell 2001 claim that any methodof policy assessment that is not purely welfarist violates the pareto prin ciple kaplow and shavell use the term welfarism to describe notionsof social welfare under which assessment of policies depends exclusivelyon their effects on individuals utilities p 281 a welfarist policy as sessment uses a social welfare function from the set

liberal egalitarianism and the harm principle this paper analyses the implications of classical liberal and libertarian approaches for distributive justice in the context of social welfare orderings an axiom capturing a liberal non interfering view of society named the weak harm principle is studied whose roots can be traced back to john stuart mill s essay on liberty it is shown that liberal views of individual autonomy and freedom can provide consistent foundations for social welfare judgements in both the finite and the infinite context in particular a liberal non interfering approach can help to adjudicate some fundamental distributive issues relative to intergenerational justice however a surprisingly strong and general relation is established between liberal views of individual autonomy and non interference and egalitarian principles in the rawlsian tradition

the evolution of comparative advantage measurement and welfare implications using an industry level dataset of production and trade spanning 75 countries and 5 decades and a fully specied multi sector ricardian model we estimate productivities at sector level and examine how they evolve over time in both developed and developing countries we nd that in both country groups comparative advantage has become weaker productivity grew systematically faster in sectors that were initially at the greater comparative disadvantage the global welfare implications of this phenomenon are signicant relative to the counterfactual scenario in which an individual country s comparative advantage remained the same as in the 1960s and technology in all sectors grew at the same country specic average rate welfare today is 1 9 lower at the median the welfare impact varies greatly across countries ranging from 0 5 to 6 among oecd countries and from 9 to 27 among non oecd countries remarkably for the oecd countries nearly all of the welfare impact is driven by changes in technology in oecd countries and for the non oecd countries nearly all of the welfare impact is driven by changes in technology in non oecd countries

are cyclical fluctuations in productivity due more to supply shocks or demand shocks measured productivity is strongly procyclical real business cycle theories suggest that actual fluctuations in productivity are the source of fluctuations in aggregate output keynesian theories maintain that fluctuations in aggregate output come from shocks to aggregate demand keynesian theories appeal to labor hoarding or off the production function behavior to explain the procyclicality of productivity if observed productivity shocks are true productivity shocks a function of factor prices should covary exactly with productivity in annual data for united states industries that function of factor prices and conventionally measured productivity move together very closely moreover their difference is uncorrelated with aggregate output this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

growth outside the stable path lessons from the european reconstruction abstract this paper exploits a natural experiment the large destruction of capital in continental europe during world war ii to characterize the transitional dynamics of an economy that begins with a capital stock below its steady state level we use these regularities as a benchmark to discriminate among competing growth specifications a model that combines non separabilities in preferences with a technology that restricts the degree of substitutability between inputs outperforms the widely used ak and cobb douglas specifications with time separable preferences our results suggest that policy evaluations based in growth models that overlook non separabilities in preferences or impose strong restrictions on the technological structure might be grossly misleading

productivity growth and factor prices in east asia the industrial revolution in several east asian countries over the last three decades is one of the most important economic events in the postwar era several recent growthaccounting exercises have found that their extraordinary rate of output growth was due primarily to an equally impressive rate of factor accumulation with little due to technological progress see alwyn young 1992 1995 jong il kim and lawrence lau 1994 susan collins and barry bosworth 1996 since these studies suggest that factor accumulation has been the lead actor in east asia s growth many economists have reached the conclusion that the industrial revolution in east asia can largely be explained in terms of transition dynamics in a neoclassical growth framework see e g paul krugman 1994 n gregory mankiw 1995 if this view is correct the lesson from east asia s experience is that there are no easy solutions for a poor country that seeks to join the league of wealthy nations low levels of investment and education may be the result of bad policies but once proper policies are enacted a poor country faces the grim prospect of a further decline in its already low standards of living as it devotes more resources to investment and education the central point of this paper is that if east asia s growth was largely driven by capital accumulation with little technological progress the return to capital should have fallen dramatically as capital accumulation encounters diminishing returns for example the capital output ratio for korea computed from the national accounts has increased at an average rate of 3 4 percent per year from 1966 to 1990 while that of singapore has increased at an average rate of 3 7 percent per year from 1968 to 1990 by dividing the share of payments to capital in total income by the capital output

youth dependency and total factor productivity abstract recent literature shows empirical support for an effect of demographic age structure on economic growth this literature does not give attention to the possibility that age structure might also have an effect on total factor productivity much of the recent literature on economic growth has stressed that an understanding of cross country differences in output per worker is needed that literature argues that the most important determinant of international differences in output per worker is differences in total factor productivity this paper finds empirical evidence in cross country data for the thesis that the youth dependency ratio the population below working age divided by the population of working age reduces residual growth which measures total factor productivity growth for this reason the paper demonstrates that age structure has an effect on the most important determinant of international differences in output per worker

bank firm relationships and contagious banking crises this paper argues that in an open economy a banking system with close bank firm relationships may be easily subject to contagious banking crises because it is difficult to distinguish between crony capitalism and good main bank relationships 1 show that if international investors cannot distinguish the bank type the distinction between crony capitalism and good main bank relationships becomes very fuzzy in particular the model can explain sequences of bank defaults within a country even if the insolvent banks are very few ex ante as well as sequences of banking crises among countries that are equally rated by international investors but indeed differ in the ex ante solvency of their banking system

hypergrowth in an east asian nic public policy and capital accumulation in singapore abstract singapore has produced the world s highest investment ratios known to account for growth more rapid than in any other less developed country over the past three decades but such high investment needs explanation we trace singapore s public policy of increasing tax concessions and infrastructural spending in effect subsidies to private firms and use an open economy neoclassical model to show how by attracting footloose foreign capital and raising investment levels these policy measures can drive growth the consequent transformation of living standards in singapore suggests in accordance with theory but contrary to most practice that for some less developed countries effectively zero tax on foreign direct investment may be a beneficial strategy yet for both singapore and other would be late industrializers major issues of development strategy arise from the kind of input driven growth analyzed in this article

adam smith watch prices and the industrial revolution although largely absent from modern accounts of the industrial revolution watches were the first mass produced consumer durable and were adam smith s preeminent example of technological progress in fact smith makes the notable claim that watch prices may have fallen by up to 95 over the preceding century a claim that this article attempts to evaluate we look at changes in the reported value of over 3 200 stolen watches from criminal trials in the old bailey in london from 1685 to 1810 before allowing for quality improvements we find that the real price of watches in nearly all categories falls steadily by 1 3 a year equivalent to a fall of 75 over a century showing that sustained innovation in the production of a highly complex artifact had already appeared in one important sector of the british economy by the early eighteenth century

investor protection optimal incentives and economic growth does investor protection foster economic growth to assess the widely held affirmative view we introduce investor protection into a standard overlapping generations model of capital accumulation better investor protection implies better risk sharing because of entrepreneurs risk aversion this results in a larger demand for capital this is the demand effect a second effect the supply effect follows from general equilibrium restrictions better protection i e higher demand increases the interest rate and lowers the income of entrepreneurs decreasing current savings and next period s supply of capital the supply effect is stronger the tighter are the restrictions on capital flows our model thus predicts that the positive effect of investor protection on growth is stronger for countries with lower restrictions cross country data provide support for this prediction as does the detailed examination of the growth experiences of south korea and india

on the impossibility of complete non interference in paretian social judgements abstract we study a principle of non interference in social welfare judgements non interference captures aspects of liberal approaches particularly a millian approach to social decision making in its full generality non interference produces an impossibility result together with weak pareto optimality it implies that a social welfare ordering must be dictatorial however interesting restricted versions of non interference are compatible with standard social welfare orderings

does total factor productivity drive housing prices a growth accounting exercise for four countries abstract housing prices diverge from construction prices after 1997 in four major countries besides total factor productivity tfp differences between construction and the general economy account for the evolution of construction prices in the us and germany but not in the uk and spain