Learning by Doing, Trade in Capital Goods and Growth

The paper aims at reconciling theoretical models of endogenous growth with the empirical evidence on trade and growth. In particular, we show that the conventional wisdom according to which trade is growth-impairing for a country with comparative advantage in goods with limited opportunities for learning fails to hold when the imported good is a capital good. The intuition is that the country gains access to cheaper capital goods, which raises investment, output per worker and learning by doing.