Protectionism constitutes a double threat. It can make recovery from the recession slower and reduce the growth potential of the international economy once recovery has taken hold.

William Easterly and Ross Levine document five stylized facts about growth and argue that they imply a bigger role for total factor productivity (TFP) and technology than for physical and human capital. I agree with the first four of their facts and believe facts 1 and 3 provide strong support...

Cross-national data show no association between increases in human capital attributable to the rising educational attainment of the labor force and the rate of growth of output per worker. This implies that the association of educational capital growth with conventional measures of total factor...

A limitation of most empirical cross-country studies that focus on determinants of GDP or GDP growth is that they fail to distinguish explicitly between inputs used in production and conditions that facilitate production. For example, physical capital, human capital, and labor are production...

Many oil; mineral; and plantation crop–based economies experienced a substantial deceleration in growth following the commodity boom and bust of the 1970s and early 1980s. This article illustrates how countries dependent on point source natural resources (those extracted from a narrow...

The impact of increased export activity on plant wages is estimated in a developing country context. To avoid potential endogenous selection problems, the empirical analysis benefits from exogenous variation in exports induced by a policy experiment—an export subsidy system implemented in...