The paper attempts to explain why single factor explanations of the poverty of nations are usually found to be unsatisfactory. Middle- and low-income countries excluding sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, have an income per head which stands at about one third of the rich countries’ income per...

The capital-output ratio is more than 40% lower in the poor countries than in the richest ones. Comparing TFP in manufacturing and in the economy at large, we show that the Balassa-Samuelson effect explains the bulk of this scarcity: TFP in manufacturing is indeed about 40% lower than TFP in the...

We attempt to explain why standard explanations of the poverty of nations are unsatisfactory. We first argue that human capital is low in poor countries because its production has increasing returns with respect to life expectancy. We then show that the reason why capital does not flow to poor...

This Paper presents a new set of data on human capital. It is constructed so as to stay as close as possible to the censuses compiled by national, OECD or UNESCO sources. We then use these data to test a model that embeds the Mincerian approach to human capital into the Mankiw, Romer and Weil...

The paper attempts to explain why single factor explanations of the poverty of nations are usually found to be unsatisfactory. Poor countries outside Africa, for instance, have an income per head which stands at about one third of the rich countries’ income per head. Yet each of the three...

We present a new data set for years of schooling across countries for the 1960–2000 period. The series are constructed from the OECD database on educational attainment and from surveys published by UNESCO. Two features that improve the quality of our data with respect to other series,...