Regional integration is on the rise again, despite its apparent failure among developing countries in the past. The paper first surveys the ambiguous economics of customs unions. We emphasize that the traditional dichotomy between `trade creation' and `trade diversion' is not particularly...

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...

Recent growth accelerations in Africa are characterized by increasing productivity in agriculture, a declining share of the labor force employed in agriculture and declining productivity in modern sectors such as manufacturing. To shed light on this puzzle, we disaggregate firms in the...

The purpose of this paper is to suggest that a fundamental shift in Europe, along with the other OECD countries, is taking place. This shift is from the managed economy to the entrepreneurial economy. While politicians and policy-makers have made a plea for guidance in the era of...

This paper is a reflective survey of past and recent econometric work on the growth of firms. Most of this work suggests that firm size follows a random walk; i.e. that corporate growth rates are random. The survey documents this, and shows what a strong result this is by contrasting it with...

Combining unique data bases on emissions with sectoral output and employment data, we study the sources of the fall in world-wide SO2 emissions and estimate the impact of trade on emissions. Contrarily to concerns raised by environmentalists, an emission-decomposition exercise shows that scale...

This paper shows that fiscal policy, when used for stabilization purposes, can have a positive effect on the economy's growth, on human capital accumulation, and on welfare, along the transition path. We introduce symmetric productivity shocks into a model in which productivity is augmented...

We use portfolio theory to quantify the efficiency of state-level sectoral patterns of production in the United States. On the basis of observed growth in sectoral value added output, we calculate for each state the efficient frontier for investments in the real economy, the efficient Sharpe...

Inaccurate measures of the aggregate price level may distort short-run policy decisions and may produce misleading comparisons of productivity growth across decades and among nations. Primarily intended for non-US readers, this paper serves the dual purpose of reviewing compactly the vast US...

We construct a model that combines elements of endogenous growth with the convergence implications of the neoclassical growth model. In the long run the world growth rate is driven by discoveries in those economies that lead in their use of technology. Followers converge towards leaders because...