Growth Patterns and Inequality in the Presence of Costly Technology Adoption

The stylized facts that motivate this article include the diversity in growth patterns that are observed across countries during the process of economic development and the divergence over time in income distributions both within and across countries. We construct a dynamic general equilibrium model in which technology adoption is costly and agents are heterogeneous in their initial holdings of resources. We interpret the adoption cost as the resources expended in acquiring skills associated with new technologies. Endogenous growth occurs in our model largely as a result of human capital deepening. The analytical results of the model characterize three growth outcomes associated with the technology adoption process depending on productivity differences between the technologies. These outcomes are labeled ‘poverty trap,’ ‘dual economy,’ and ‘balanced growth.’ The model is then capable of explaining the observed diversity in growth patterns in addition to the divergence of incomes over time and across countries.     

Foreign Aid, Domestic Investment and Welfare

This paper examines the welfare implications of temporary foreign aid in a simple two-period, two-country model of trade. Domestic investment is endogenous, providing an important link between aid in period one and the terms of trade in periods one and two. Transfer-induced changes in the terms of trade redistribute present and future income between the donor and the recipient. In the presence of barriers to international borrowing and lending, such redistribution gives rise to the possibility of temporary aid being both potentially and strictly Pareto improving.     

Promoting Trade Liberalization: Theoretical Analysis of Foreign Aid as Prize

We investigate whether foreign aid can be used to induce trade policy reforms. We develop a two‐period political economic model where promise of aid in period 2 depends on chosen tariff in period 1. We consider three scenarios depending on whether the donor is passive/active and whether the two governments move simultaneously or sequentially. We find a sufficient condition for unconditional aid to increase the level of optimal tariff, and the possibility of unconditional aid increasing optimal tariff decreases when the donor is active rather than passive.     

Structural Break,Indivisibilities and Input–Output Analysis

This paper sets up and analyses a model of structural break in the framework of input–output (IO) analysis. The idea of structural break is formalized in terms of an IO model where each commodity can be produced by two alternative technologies; one of which is subjected to technologically specified indivisibility in its level of operation. The analysis of the model consists of suggesting an iterative procedure for computing its solution and developing a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of solutions. Some results have also been derived on the question of uniqueness of a solution.     

Donor Strategy under the Fungibility of Foreign Aid

We develop a political–economic model of aid fungibility: a part of aid is diverted away from its intended target by lobby groups. The size of this diversion – the degree of aid fungibility – is determined endogenously by the recipient government. The donor can affect the equilibrium degree of fungibility by choosing both the size of aid and the timing of its decision. We derive a condition under which the donor's reaction to fungibility is to reduce the amount of aid. Under this condition, if the donor acts as a follower, both the donor and the target group are better off.     

Demography and welfare economics

The focusing on demographic issues as an important part of welfare-economic assessment shifts the evaluative space in the direction of public discussion and social concern. A commoditycentred view of individual success and social welfare is often used in economics. But the linkage between our economic wealth and our ability to live as we would like has strong limits. This is partly because of interpersonal variations between individuals, but also because of variations in public and social arrangements (for example, for public health care, education and social security). The use of demographic perspectives can enrich economic analysis in several ways. In particular a demographically oriented system of evaluation can not only focus on variables that we all value, but it also gives us the freedom to decide what weights would be most appropriate for the exercise in which we might be engaged. The problem of valuation in welfare economics is ultimately a social-choice issue, requiring the use of explicit judgments on which the society can achieve some consensus through political processes.Lecture presented to the annual meeting of the Austrian Economic Association in Vienna, 24 May 1994. The author is grateful for support from the National Science Foundation for the research on which this paper draws.     

On the constancy of real interest rates

In the context of a small structural model, we show that the autocorrelation and the variance of the ex ante real rate of interest can be uniquely estimated; the random forecasting errors need not confound the problem of identifying variations in the real rate.