Agriculture's share of economic activity is known to vary inversely with a country's level of development. This paper examines whether extensions of the neoclassical growth model can account for some important sectoral patterns observed in a current cross-section of countries and in the time...

We introduce home production into the neoclassical growth model and examine its consequences for development economics. In particular, we study the extent to which one can account for international income differences with differences in policies that distort capital accumulation. In models with...

A large fraction of Uganda's population continues to earn a living from quasi-subsistence agriculture. This paper uses a static general equilibrium model to explore the relationships between high transportation costs, low productivity, and the size of the quasi-subsistence sector. We...

A defining feature of many poor economies is the large fraction of workers engaged in subsistence agriculture. We develop a multi-sector multi-region model of a poor economy in which it is costly to transport goods across regions in order to study this outcome. A key finding is that higher...

Although many of the worst performing countries over the post-World War II period were autocracies, many of the best were likewise autocratic. At the same time, no long-lived autocracy currently is rich whereas every long-lived democracy is. This paper proposes a theory to account for these...

In an attempt to account for the huge observed disparity in international incomes, several recent papers study models in the spirit of Solow (1960) where the adoptions of better technologies require investments in new equipment. This paper continues this line of research. It describes an economy...