The paper measures productivity growth in seventeen countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  GDP per worker and capital per worker in 1985 US dollars were estimated for 1820, 1850, 1880, 1913, 1939 by using historical national accounts to back cast Penn World Table data for 1965...

Using data for 128 countries we document low (high) elasticities of agricultural output with respect to labor in economies within temperate (tropical/highland) climate zones.  Adopting a standard model of structural change we show that this technology heterogeneity determines the speed of...

The Cross-country growth literature commonly uses aggregate economy datasets such as the Penn World Table (PWT) to estimate homogeneous production function or convergence regression models.  Against the background of a dual economy framework this paper investigates the potential bias arising...

Since the seminal contribution of Gregory Mankiw, David Romer and David Weil (1992), the growth empirics literature has used increasingly sophisticated methods to select relevant growth determinants in estimating cross-section regressions.  The vast majority of empirical approaches however...

China's economy grew at an average annual real growth rate of 9 percent over the last three decades.  Despite the vast empirical literature on testing the neoclassical model of economic growth using data on various groups of countries, very few cross-country regressions include China and none...

Using a new database for the whole 1900-2000 period, this paper estimates the relative contribution of endogenous and exogenous factors in GDP and productivity growth in each of the six larger Latin American economies with multivariate annual models, and complements these with a single aggregate...

Although research and development is widely considered to be an important source of growth, relatively little is known about how its effects differ across industries. This is mainly because much research on the effect of R&D has used either cross-section or time-series data and the remainder has...

The growth process for a technological leader is different from that of a follower. While followers can grow through imitation and capital deepening, a leader must undertake original research. This suggests that as the gap between the leader and the follower narrows, the follower must undertake...

After a dramatic slowdown of the 1970s, productivity growth in UK manufacturing in the 1980s returned to something like its pre-slowdown trend. This paper constructs a quarterly dynamic model of TFP growth in UK manufacturing using cointegration techniques, correcting for a variety of...

The growth process for a technological leader is different from that of a follower. While followers can grow through imitation and capital deepening, a leader must undertake original research. This suggests that as the gap between the leader and the follower narrows, the follower must undertake...