Many technologies used by the LDCs are developed in the OECD economies and are designed to make optimal use of the skills of these richer countries' workforces. Differences in the supply of skills create a mismatch between the requirements of these technologies and the skills of LDC workers, and...

Estimates for the US suggest that at least in some sectors productivity-enhancing reallocation is the dominant factor in accounting for productivity growth. An open question, particularly relevant for developing countries, is whether reallocation is always productivity enhancing. It may be that...

Major changes have occurred in the structure of former centrally planned economies, including a sharp rise in the share of services in GDP, employment and international transactions. However, large differences exist across transition economies with respect to services intensity and services...

Standard growth accounting exercises find large cross-country differences in aggregate TFP. Here we ask whether specific sectors are driving these differences, and, if this is the case, which these problem sectors are. We argue that to answer these questions we need to consider four sectors. In...

We offer a duality-based methodology for incorporating multi-sector effects of international trade into open economy macroeconomic models, developing the concepts of the dynamic factor price equalization set and the integrated intertemporal equilibrium. Under this approach, the aggregate...

This Paper analyses the welfare benefits from falling relative prices of IT (Information Technology) goods across a wide range of countries. Using two separate methodologies and datasets, we find that welfare benefits mainly accrue to users of IT, not their producers, because of falling relative...

The controversy over the appropriate partitioning of East Asian growth into accumulation versus technical change has overlooked a fundamental indeterminacy in measurement. As a result, we cannot rule out the possibility that East Asia has in fact experienced a tremendous amount of technological...

We construct and estimate a unified model combining three of the main sources of cross-country income disparities: differences in factor endowments, barriers to technology adoption and the inappropriateness of frontier technologies to local conditions. The key components are different types of...

Conventional PPP-adjusted real output measures, invaluable for making international comparisons of living standards, may greatly exaggerate the productive capacity of poor countries. The equilibrium prices of an hypothetical world of full economic integration provide an instructive basis for...

This paper reinterprets a simple model of growth and fluctuations across many economies to allow for the explicit characterization of the dynamically-evolving cross-economy distribution of income. Such a framework provides a more natural, revealing study of the convergence hypothesis. The data...