The capital-output ratio is more than 40% lower in the poor countries than in the richest ones. Comparing TFP in manufacturing and in the economy at large, we show that the Balassa-Samuelson effect explains the bulk of this scarcity: TFP in manufacturing is indeed about 40% lower than TFP in the...

This Paper presents a new set of data on human capital. It is constructed so as to stay as close as possible to the censuses compiled by national, OECD or UNESCO sources. We then use these data to test a model that embeds the Mincerian approach to human capital into the Mankiw, Romer and Weil...

The paper attempts to explain why single factor explanations of the poverty of nations are usually found to be unsatisfactory. Poor countries outside Africa, for instance, have an income per head which stands at about one third of the rich countries’ income per head. Yet each of the three...

This book is an in-depth discussion of rising inequalities in the western world. It explores the extent to which rising inequalities are the mechanical consequence of changes in economic fundamentals (such as changes in technological or demographic parameters), and to what extent they are the...

Contributors to this volume - Bruno Amable (CEPREMAP, Paris - France) Philippe Askenazy (CNRS and CEPREMAP, Paris - France) Eric Bartelsman (Free University, Amsterdam - The Netherlands) Andrea Bassanini (OECD, Paris - France) Daniel Cohen (Delta, Paris - France) Gosta Esping-Andersen...

This book is an in-depth discussion of rising inequalities in the western world. It explores the extent to which rising inequalities are the mechanical consequence of changes in economic fundamentals (such as changes in technological or demographic parameters), and to what extent they are the...

Why do countries default? This seemingly simple question has yet to be adequately answered in the literature. Indeed, prevailing modelling strategies compel the to choose between two unappealing model features: depending on the cost of default selected by the modeler, either the debt ratios are...

The paper compiles a new data base, based on the earlier work by Kray and Nehu, to assess the determinants of sovereign debt crises over the last forty years. A simple statistical analysis of the cause of the crises is performed. It shows that neither the serial defaulter nor the "global crisis"...

We distinguish two types of debt crises: those that are the outcome of exogenous shocks (to productivity growth for instance) and those that are endogenously created, either by self-fulfilling panic in financial markets or by the reckless behavior of "Panglossian" borrowers. After Krugman, we...

During the XXth century, life expectancy levels have converged across the world. Yet, macroeconomic studies, as Acemoglu and Johnson (2007), estimate that improvements in health have no impact on growth or any factors of growth; in particular, they find no impact of life expectancy increases on...