Technological Diffusion, Convergence, and Growth

We construct a model that combines elements of endogenousgrowth with the convergence implications of the neoclassicalgrowth model. In the long run, the world growth rate is drivenby discoveries in the technologically leading economies. Followersconverge toward the leaders because copying is cheaper than innovationover some range. A tendency for copying costs to increase reducesfollowers growth rates and thereby generates a pattern of conditionalconvergence. We discuss how countries are selected to be technologicalleaders, and we assess welfare implications. Poorly defined intellectualproperty rights imply that leaders have insufficient incentiveto invent and followers have excessive incentive to copy.  

Inequality and Growth in a Panel of Countries

Evidence from a broad panel of countries shows little overall relation between income inequality and rates of growth and investment. For growth, higher inequality tends to retard growth in poor countries and encourage growth in richer places. The Kuznets curve—whereby inequality first increases and later decreases during the process of economic development—emerges as a clear empirical regularity. However, this relation does not explain the bulk of variations in inequality across countries or over time.  

Democracy and growth

Growth and democracy (subjective indexes of political freedom) are analyzed for a panel of about 100 countries from 1960 to 1990. The favorable effects on growth include maintenance of the rule of law, free markets, small government consumption, and high human capital. Once these kinds of variables and the initial level of real per capita GDP are held constant, the overall effect of democracy on growth is weakly negative. There is a suggestion of a nonlinear relationship in which more democracy enhances growth at low levels of political freedom but depresses growth when a moderate level of freedom has already been attained. Improvements in the standard of living—measured by GDP, health status, and education—substantially raise the probability that political freedoms will grow. These results allow for predictions about which countries will become more or less democratic over time.  

Notes on Growth Accounting

Growth accounting breaks down economic growth into components associated with changes in factor inputs and the Solow residual, which reflects technological progress and other elements. After a presentation of the standard model, the analysis considers dual approaches to growth accounting (which considers changes in factor prices rather than quantities), spillover effects and increasing returns, taxes, and multiple types of factor inputs. Later sections place the growth-accounting exercise within the context of two recent strands of endogenous growth theory—varieties-of-products models and quality-ladders models. Within these settings, the Solow residual can be interpreted in terms of measures of the endogenously changing level of technology.  

Measuring the Fed's revenue from money creation

The national accounts include the Fed's payments to the Treasury as a component of corporate taxes. These payments constituted 22% of reported corporate profits taxes in 1981. Alternative concepts of inflationary finance are considered, with measurements provided for the post-World War II period.  

Social security and consumer spending in an international cross section

This paper expands the base of empirical evidence on the social security aggregate private saving issue by examining the behavior of consumer expenditure in 16 industrialized countries over the 1951–60 period. The results are mixed in that time series movements of social security exhibit a positive relation to consumer spending, while the cross-sectional variations reveal a negative association. Our overall conclusion is that the cross-country evidence provides neither empirical support for the hypothesis that social security depresses private saving nor an empirical refutation of that hypothesis. We argue that this indeterminacy of results applies also to previous studies of U.S. time series and to analyses of household cross sections in the U.S.