This paper studies how differences in the size of barriers to capital accumulation can account for differences in long run economic development paths. In this model barriers affect both the beginning date and the pace of the modern economic growth. A fundamental property of the model is that cross country income differences matches the inverted U-shape pattern over time as observed in the data, hence implies a substantial fraction of existing income differences is really a transitional phenomenon. Relative to papers that model this as steady state phenomenon, my model requires a smaller size of barriers to account for current disparities. Another important finding is that this transitional effect increases significantly when I include the fact that today's low-income countries have had higher population growth rates during their early development stage than did the currently rich countries. In a quantitative exercise I find that given the beginning dates of modern growth, the model accounts for a significant portion of current income differences.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Centre for Economic Performance, LSE in its series CEP Discussion Papers with number
dp0561.
Find related papers by JEL classification: D58 - Microeconomics - - General Equilibrium and Disequilibrium - - - Computable and Other Applied General Equilibrium Models O11 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Macroeconomic Analyses of Economic Development O14 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Industrialization; Manufacturing and Service Industries; Choice of Technology O42 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity - - - Monetary Growth Models
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
McGrattan, Ellen R. & Schmitz, James Jr., 1999.
"Explaining cross-country income differences,"
Handbook of Macroeconomics,
in: J. B. Taylor & M. Woodford (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 10, pages 669-737
Elsevier.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Other versions:
Gary D. Hansen & Edward C. Prescott, 1999.
"Malthus to Solow,"
Staff Report
257, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
[Downloadable!]
Other versions:
Gary D. Hansen & Edward C. Prescott, 1998.
"Malthus to Solow,"
NBER Working Papers
6858, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Gary D. Hansen & Edward C. Prescott, 2002.
"Malthus to Solow,"
American Economic Review,
American Economic Association, vol. 92(4), pages 1205-1217, September.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)