What obstacles prevent the most productive technologies from spreading to less developed economies from the world’s technological frontier? In this paper, we seek to shed light on this question by quantifying the geographic and human barriers to the transmission of technologies. We argue that...

We use the two-sector specific factors model, which is known from the theory of international trade, in a growth context to describe major trends of long-run economic development. The endogenous technical progress functions establish the link between the agricultural and the manufacturing sector...

The paper analyses a two-sector model of endogenous growth with two common features of economic development: stages of sustained growth and underdevelopment traps. The model also demonstrates the transitional issues of a temporary underdevelopment trap, seemingly sustainable growth, and a...

We provide an overview of recent empirical research on patterns of cross-country growth. The new empirical regularities considered differ from earlier ones, e.g., the well-known Kaldor stylized facts. The new research no longer makes production function accounting a central part of the analysis....

The point of departure for the study of the impact of energy and environmental policies is the neoclassical theory of economic growth formulated by Cass (1965) and Koopmans (1967). The long-run properties of economic growth models are independent of energy and environmental policies. However,...

We present a tractable model for analyzing the relationship between economic growth and the intensive and extensive margins of technology adoption. The “extensive" margin refers to the timing of a country's adoption of a new technology; the “intensive" margin refers to how many units are...

This article offers a personal view of the main achievements of (broadly) neoclassical growth theory, along with a few of the important gaps that remain. It discusses briefly the pluses and minuses of two major recent lines of research: endogenous growth theory and the drawing of causal...

Distortions in private investment due to credit frictions, and in public investment due to corruption and bureaucratic inefficiencies, have both been suggested as important factors in accounting for the cross-country per capita income distribution. We introduce two modifications to the standard...

Rodrik (2016) pointed out that late industrializing countries are experiencing a lower peak at lower income levels in the manufacturing employment share hump-shaped path. The present study develops a theoretical model to analyze the dynamics of industrialization and deindustrialization in...