世界経済・社会統計 = World development indicators

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.2307%2F3343168.pdf

Development as Freedom

https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf

The future of employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?

This paper analyzes the role of wealth distribution in macroeconomics through investment in human capital. It is shown that in the presence of credit markets' imperfections and indivisibilities in investment in human capital, the initial distribution of wealth affects aggregate output and investment both in the short and in the long run, as there are multiple steady states. This paper therefore provides an additional explanation for the persistent differences in per-capita output across countries. Furthermore, the paper shows that cross-country differences in macroeconomic adjustment to aggregate shocks can be attributed, among other factors, to differences in wealth and income distribution across countries.

/pdf/income-distribution-and-macroeconomics-1a56oblrfr.pdf

Income Distribution and Macroeconomics

We investigate whether income inequality affects subsequent growth in a cross-country sample for 1965-90, using the models of Barro (1997), Bleaney and Nishiyama (2002) and Sachs and Warner (1997), with negative results. We then investigate the evolution of income inequality over the same period and its correlation with growth. The dominating feature is inequality convergence across countries. This convergence has been significantly faster amongst developed countries. Growth does not appear to influence the evolution of inequality over time. Outline

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/81822/1/02-28.pdf

Economic growth and income inequality

Fertility and Scarcity in America.

DOES RESTRICTION of foreign investment improve the balance of payments of the lending country? The question is ambiguous until one decides what time horizon to assign both to the restrictions and to their impact. The effects of a single year's capital flows on the payments position for that year differ greatly from their effects on subsequent periods, which in turn differ from the impact of a whole stream of investments over several years on the balance of payments for one or many years. The choice of a time horizon appropriate for policy appraisal should be clear enough. Policymakers are responsible for all consequences of their actions or inaction from the moment of decision to the infinitely distant future. Any attempt to summarize the impact of policies bearing on foreign investments must therefore encompass the effects of all induced changes in investment on all subsequent time periods. The summary measures to be employed here are (1) an internal rate of discount for contributions to payments surplus and (2) the present value of all such contributions. Inappropriate resolution of this basic problem of time reference seems to be the most serious of several drawbacks in past studies of U.S. foreign lending and the balance of payments. Instead of discounting all payments effects over time, both defenders and opponents of foreign investment curbs have chosen to focus on pay-back periods and simple cumulative sums of effects. Such measures are difficult to interpret and have generated inconclusive debate. Consultants and officials of the U.S. Treasury have produced figures demonstrating long pay-back periods for U.S. direct investment outflows.' These findings have been attacked in testimony on behalf of investors and in studies commissioned by the National Industrial Conference Board and the National Foreign Trade Council,2 which have insisted that foreign investments repay the nation very quickly and cannot be curtailed without serious damage to the balance of payments and national welfare.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2326085.pdf

The payments impact of foreign investment controls

Three factors help to explain why school enrollments in the Northern United States were higher than those in the South and in most of Europe by 1850. One was affordability: the northern states had higher real incomes, cheaper teachers, and greater local tax support. The second was the greater autonomy of local governments. The third was the greater diffusion of voting power among the citizenry in much of the North, especially in rural communities. The distribution of local political voice appears to be a robust predictor of tax support and enrollments, both within and between regions.

The Curious Dawn of American Public Schools

This essay proposes a set of non-econometric tests using data on wage structure, school resource costs, public expenditures, taxes, and rates of return to explain anomalies in which richer political units deliver less education than poorer ones. Both the anomalies of education history, and its less surprising contrasts, fit broad patterns that can be revealed and partially explained using low-tech methods. Over most of human history, contrasts in the output of education were driven mainly by contrasts in the supply of tax support for mass education. Exogenous influences on the demand for, and the private supply of, education played only lesser roles. Pro-growth public education could have emerged a century or two earlier than it did, had the leading countries of Western Europe mustered the political will to fund it. Government underinvestment in mass education is demonstrated for England and Wales between 1717 and 1891. Differences in political support still account for most of today's education anomalies where the contrasts involve less developed regions. In today's highest-income settings, however, differences in tax funding lose their previous explanatory power. The postwar shift away from strong effects of school resources calls for a renewed introduction of historical context into the "does money matter" debate.

/pdf/revealing-failures-in-the-history-of-school-finance-13jwxvbpyj.pdf

Revealing Failures in the History of School Finance

The debate over whether political democracy is the least bad regime, as Churchill once said, remains unresolved because history has been ignored or misread, and because recent statistical studies have not chosen the right tests. Using too little historical information, and mistaking formal democratic rules for true voice, has understated the gains from spreading political voice more equally. This paper draws on a deeper history, reinterpreting five key experiences to show how the institutional channels linking voice and growth are themselves evolving with the economy. Up to about the early nineteenth century, the key institutional link was property rights and contract enforcement. Since the early nineteenth century, the human-investment channel has assumed an ever-greater role. This trend will probably continue. A telltale sign of damage to growth from elite rule is the under-investment of public funds in egalitarian human capital especially primary schooling, relative to historical norms for successful economies.

Peter H. Lindert

Papers

Fertility and Scarcity in America.

The payments impact of foreign investment controls

The Curious Dawn of American Public Schools

Revealing Failures in the History of School Finance

Voice and Growth: Was Churchill Right?