A longstanding question in economics is why some countries are so much richer than others. Today, for example, income per capita in the world's richest countries is roughly thirty-five times greater than it is in the world's poorest countries. Recent work argues that the proximate cause of the...

A large fraction of Uganda's population continues to earn a living from quasi-subsistence agriculture. This paper uses a static general equilibrium model to explore the relationships between high transportation costs, low productivity, and the size of the quasi-subsistence sector. We...

A longstanding question in economics is why some countries are so much richer than others. Today, for example, income per capita in the worldÂ’s richest countries is roughly thirty-five times greater than it is in the worldÂ’s poorest countries. Recent work (e.g., Robert E. Lucas 2001, and...

AgricultureÂ’s share of economic activity is known to vary inversely with a countryÂ’s level of development. This paper examines whether extensions of the neoclassical growth model can account for some important sectoral patterns observed in a current cross-section of countries and in the...

A defining feature of many poor economies is the large fraction of workers engaged in subsistence agriculture. We develop a multi-sector multi-region model of a poor economy in which it is costly to transport goods across regions in order to study this outcome. A key finding is that higher...