DISTRIBUTIONS OF REAL INCOME: WITHIN COUNTRIES AND BY WORLD INCOME CLASSES

Income and expenditure data from 14 countries (representing one-third of the world's population), mostly from the 1970s, are used to construct national income distributions and , after normalizing by purchasing power parities, to construct a "world" distribution of real income. The density of real-income equivalent groups (socio-economic classes) across countries is measured for the "affluent," the "well-off," and the "poor." In comparison with earlier studies, most national distributions of income seem to have been improving, the numbers of those in poverty (based on real income) are lower, and, most important (and disturbing for some) is that the "affluent" class (and those above "middle class" income levels) has (prematurely) swelled in a number of developing countries.     

Exchange Rates and State - Led Capitalism: What Can the NIC's Learn from Japan?

Having failed the free-market, laissez-faire, capitalist-economic-development interpretation, Japan's economic success is currently accorded a "revisionist" approach: it is treated as a "special case" on the grounds that Japan operates along a different set of cultural, economic, and political imperatives. This paper offers an alternative systematic economic interpretation of the "Japanese Miracle" which has transference to other countries. It is based on the Ricardo Principle, and uses purchasing-power-parity data to analyze Japanese development policies that led to successfully "leapfrogging" the process of economic development. The state of underdevelopment, with initial conditions that led to specialization in labor-intensive, low-value-added exports, and resulted in low wages and low living standards was ended "prematurely" in the 1960s, lest the country be trapped in its static comparative advantage. The state of development was then launched, with specialization in capital- and technology-intensive exports that had dynamic comparative advantage down-the-road. The process is characterized as "State-led capitalism," with the government using its strong arm to the purpose of achieving pluralistic economic development.     

What has orthodox development economics learned from recent experience?

Orthodox development economics has advocated the view that the challenge of development lies in the initiation of take-off. Once initiated, however, an array of mechanisms could be counted on to maintain development and to assure that it would trickle and spread into various pockets of poverty internationally as well as within countries. From the vantage point of the orthodox approach the recent experience of developing countries with rapid growth but growing unemployment and income inequality comes, therefore, as a surprise. This paper suggests that this experience squares more satisfactorily with an alternative disequilibrium interpretation of the development process. Some building blocks of a new paradigm that would emphasize disequilibrium processes are specified and illustrated with respect to the contemporary landscape of developing countries. The policy and other implications of the alternative disequilibrium and orthodox paradigms are contrasted.     

Morphology of growth : The effects of country size, structural characteristics and linkages

This paper investigates the extent to which tests concerning the influence of various kinds of structural imbalance indexes on the overall rate of economic growth may be sensitive to (1) differences in the extent to which various country characteristics are reflected in the normal growth path and hence in the imbalance indexes, (2) differences in the level of disaggregation or part of the economy at which imbalance is measured, and (3) the type of countries to which the analysis is applied. The results based on imbalance indexes and growth rates for a sample of 42 countries 1960–1970 and 1970–1978 are shown to be sensitive to all three of these considerations.