Technological Change and Transition: Relative Contributions to Worldwide Growth During the 1990s

In this paper we use the Kumar and Russell [American Economic Review (2002) Vol. 92, pp. 527–548] growth‐accounting procedure to examine cross‐country growth during the 1990s. Using a data set comprising developed, newly industrialized, developing and transitional economies, we decompose the growth of output per worker into components attributable to technological catch‐up, technological change and capital accumulation. In contrast to the study by Kumar and Russell, which concludes that capital deepening is the major force of growth and change in the world income per worker distribution over the 1965–90 period, our analysis shows that, during the 1990s, the major force in the further divergence of the rich and the poor is due to technological change, whereas capital accumulation plays a lesser and opposite role. Finally, although on average we find that transitional economies perform similar to the rest of the world, the procedure is able to discover some interesting patterns within the set of transitional countries.