THE NEW GROWTH THEORIES AND THEIR EMPIRICS, Discussion Paper in Economics, University of Glasgow, N. 2005-04 (http://www.gla.ac.uk/Acad/Economics

The aim of this paper is to update the reviews on endogenous growth theories in order to explore whether recent empirical studies are more supportive of their main predictions. Among the core topics studied in the growth econometric framework, namely, convergence, identifications of growth determinants and factors responsible of growth differences in the data, the primary focus of this paper is on the last two. Since the use of econometrics was originally motivated by convergence issues, in this work we will review econometric studies that test primarily the relevance of endogenous models in terms of significance and robustness of growth’s determinant coefficients. We argue that: (i) causal inference drawn from the empirical growth literature remains highly questionable, ii) there are estimates for a wide range of potential factors but their magnitude and robustness are still under debate. Overall, however, if properly interpreted, endogenous growth models' predictions are increasingly gaining empirical support.