IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/intecp/978-1-349-15456-2_1.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The Gap: Concept, Measurement, Trends

In: The Gap Between Rich and Poor Nations

Author

Listed:
  • Simon Kuznets

    (Harvard University)

Abstract

By rich nations we presumably mean those that command a volume of economic goods that, relative to population, is significantly larger than some acceptable level. By analogy those nations are poor whose command of economic goods, on a per capita basis, is so much below that acceptable level as to imply major shortcomings and deprivation. This command over goods may be approximated by the stock of material assets, preferably supplemented by some valuation of the human resources at the nation’s disposal. But the effective magnitude of such productive assets is best revealed by the annual output which they, in fact, serve to produce. Despite several vexing problems of definition and interpretation, the long-term level of per capita national product is still a reasonable criterion of the wealth and poverty of nations — long-term meaning periods long enough to obviate distortion by transient disturbances and fluctuations.

Suggested Citation

  • Simon Kuznets, 1972. "The Gap: Concept, Measurement, Trends," International Economic Association Series, in: Gustav Ranis (ed.), The Gap Between Rich and Poor Nations, chapter 1, pages 3-58, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:intecp:978-1-349-15456-2_1
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-15456-2_1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Rafael Reuveny & William R. Thompson, 2002. "World Economic Growth, Northern Antagonism, and North-south Conflict," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 46(4), pages 484-514, August.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:intecp:978-1-349-15456-2_1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.