Science, innovation, knowledge and digital technologies have played a fundamental role in the growth potential, social inclusion and environmental sustainability of countries in recent decades, and have become even more important in the context of the crisis caused by the coronavirus disease...

"The authors develop an endogenous growth model that combines structural change with repeated product improvement. That is, the technologies in one sector of the model become not only increasingly capital-intensive, but also progressively productive over time. Application of the basic model to...

Large gaps in labor productivity between the traditional and modern parts of the economy are a fundamental reality of developing societies. In this paper, we document these gaps, and emphasize that labor flows from low-productivity activities to high-productivity activities are a key driver of...

This paper uses the natural experiment of Argentina's integration into world markets in the late-nineteenth century to provide evidence on the role of internal geography in shaping the effects of external integration. We develop a quantitative model of the distribution of economic activity...

Developing countries made considerable gains during the first decade of the 21st century. Their economies grew at unprecedented rates, resulting in large reductions in extreme poverty and a significant expansion of the middle class. But more recently that progress has slowed with an economic...

This paper examines the role of agricultural diversity in the process of development. Using data from U.S. counties and exploiting climate-induced variation in agricultural production patterns, I show that mid-19th century agricultural diversity had positive long-run effects on population...

This paper is motivated by a set of cross-country observations on growth, structural transformation, and investment rates in a large sample of countries. We observe a hump-shaped relationship between a country's investment rate and its level of development, both within countries over time and...

The 1980s were both the lost decade of growth for much of Latin America and Africa, and the period in which -- through the new growth theory -- macroeconomists returned to the study of growth and development. The new growth theory is production function driven and concerned primarily with steady...

The paper combines insights from the recent research programs on constitutions and economic policy, and on history, institutions and growth. Drawing on cross-sectional as well as panel data, it presents new empirical results showing that the form of democracy (rather than democracy vs....

The objective of this report is to identify the main obstacles to longer term growth in Jamaica. The report takes a holistic approach, examining a large set of economic and social factors that may be hindering growth and filtering them through a growth diagnostic analysis to narrow the focus to...