The combination of consumer preferences, technological changes, and different income elasticities among goods and services can generate inequalities among agents leading to winners and losers. Inspired by these mechanisms, we pose the following research question: "Can immiserizing growth (IG)...

The combination of consumer preferences, technological changes, and different income elasticities among goods and services can generate inequalities among agents leading to winners and losers. Inspired by these mechanisms, we pose the following research question: “Can immiserizing growth (IG)...

When a country experiences economic growth, its production capacity increases, i.e., its production of exportable and importable increases. If the increase of both goods leads to more export and less import, and lower welfare level, growth is immiserizing. This paper proves that Jagdish...

When a country experiences economic growth, its export increases, leading to a lower export price. Bhagwati regarded the lower price as immiserizing. He also needed a higher import price to complete his theory, but his lower import demand should lead, contradictorily, to a lower import price....

Will smart machines do to humans what the internal combustion engine did to horses – make them obsolete? If so, can putting people out of work or, at least, good work leave them unable to buy what smart machines produce? Our model's answer is yes. Over time and under the right conditions,...

Will smart machines replace humans like the internal combustion engine replaced horses? If so, can putting people out of work, or at least out of good work, also put the economy out of business? Our model says yes. Under the right conditions, more supply produces, over time, less demand as the...

Based on a neoclassical growth model for open low income economies this paper shows that development strategies, which rely on net borrowing abroad lead to a position of sustainable foreign indebtedness (provided that all capital imports are used for investment financing), but turn out to be...

Based on a neoclassical growth model for open low income economies this paper shows that development strategies, which rely on net borrowing abroad lead to a position of sustainable foreign indebtedness (provided that all capital imports are used for investment financing), but turn out to be...

We investigate whether robots raise or lower economic well-being for generations alive during and after their development. While capital that perfectly substitutes for human labor can increase output, it can also lower labor demand and labor’s share of income. Workers who are in retirement...

We demonstrate that Rybczynski’s classic comparative statics can be reversed in a Heckscher-Ohlin world when preferences in each country favor the exported commodity. This taste bias has empirical support. An increase in the endowment of a factor of production can lead to an absolute...

Theoretically economic growth could have negative effects over the growing economy when production expands for products the world demand for which is inelastic. If growth occurs in sectors and for products the world demand for which is elastic it could be expected that total revenues to domestic...

We present an OLG model in which life expectancy and environmental quality dynamics are jointly determined. Agents may invest in environmental care, depending on how much they expect to live. In turn, environmental conditions affect life expectancy. As a result, our model produces a positive...

We develop a model with three key features: a factor market distortion, monopoly power in the product market and indivisibilities in consumption. In this setting, multiple equilibria arise, one with high and the other with low equilibrium wages, incomes and output. It is also shown that even in...

This paper argues that opening up an economy to trade can result in welfare reducing deindustrialization when agents are subject to credit constraints. The standard interpretation of such deindustrialization as a reallocation of resources across sectors with no aggregate long-term adverse...

This paper develops a model with three key features: a factor market distortion, monopoly power in the product market, and indivisibilities in consumption. We show that in this setting, there are multiple equilibria: one with high and the other with low equilibrium wages, incomes and output....

This paper offers a simple model that reconciles rivalrous claims about liberalization's impact on low-income agrarian economies; growth can accompany smallholder welfare reduction. The model developed here reverses the causality of Bhagwati's immiserizing growth model:price shocks cause welfare...

Microeconomic models posit that transaction costs isolate subsistence producers from output market shocks. We integrate microeconomic models of many heterogeneous households into a general equilibrium model and show that supply on subsistence farms may respond, in apparently perverse ways, to...

We explore steady-state inequality in an intergenerational model with altruistically linked individuals who experience privately observed taste shocks. When the welfare function depends only on the initial generation, efficiency requires immiseration: inequality grows without bound and...