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

Thomas Piketty's monumental Capital in the Twenty-First Century has transported us to a higher understanding of historical movements in inequality This essay ranks the promise of different paths that scholars can usefully follow from the point to which his book has guided us The main path to follow is the income inequality history so well paved by Piketty and his team, supported by the book's history of twentieth-century shocks and political responses Less promising is the book's emphasis on wealth, capital, and the rate of return Following the income route to better inequality predictions requires merging his team's history of top income shares with the history of inequality movements within the lower 90 percent It also invites a merger with other scholarship that has shown positive growth effects of the kind of democracy Piketty calls for

Making the Most of Capital in the 21st Century

Public interest in America’s foreign trade has always concentrated on the issue of America’s “competitiveness” or “leadership” in foreign trade, and whether government policies have promoted it. This chapter addresses those perennial concerns. What has shaped America’s ability to compete, and her comparative advantage, in international trade? Has government policy toward foreign trade been aimed at raising national living standards, and has it had that result? The five main conclusions reached here feature some rise-and-fall patterns and some revisions of frequent misconceptions: 1. America’s comparative advantages in natural-resource products and in skill-intensive products rose and fell in waves. Our relative exports of natural-resource products peaked around World War I, while our comparative advantage in skill-intensive products peaked in the 1950s and declined until the 1990s. In retrospect, one of the most striking features of American comparative advantage is the steady ascent of skill-intensive exports from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, whereas the “Dutch disease” model would have predicted that our abundance of natural resources would have killed our advantage in skill-intensive manufactures as in so many other countries. 2. U.S. competitive leadership rose and fell , peaking in the 1950s and hitting a low in the early 1980s before recovering somewhat. Early in this century it fell to British and Japanese writers to blame their business leaders, their workers, their government, and their national bad luck for the American, and German, competitive edge in the prestigious modern sectors. By the 1970s and 1980s America had caught up to Britain as a world leader in self-flagellation over lost markets. 3. ...

U.S. Foreign Trade and Trade Policy in the Twentieth Century

Building social tables in the tradition of Gregory King, we develop new estimates suggesting that between 1774 and 1800 American incomes fell in real per capita terms. The colonial South was richer than the North at the start, but was already beginning to lose its income lead by 1800. We also find that free American colonists had much more equal incomes than did households in England and Wales. The colonists also had greater purchasing power than their English counterparts over all of the income ranks except in the top few percent.

American Incomes before and after the Revolution

The author of any paper with policy implications welcomes discussion of his results, in the knowledge that what is not discussed is forgotten. In this spirit I welcome Dr. Stevens' paper calling for further examination of my framework for analysing the balance-of-payments effects of controls on foreign investment.' As he notes, it is puzzling that the earlier literature had devoted so much attention to the hard-to-interpret payback periods instead of looking at the kinds of present-value and rate-of-return calculations initiated by my December 1971 article. Stevens goes on to suggest two revisions in the 1971 article, one dealing with estimated trade effects and one extending my framework to cover the case of rapidly growing outflows checked by permanent controls. These points are worth discussing, since other readers of the 1971 article may also have wanted more treatment of them than space permitted in 1971. Yet it turns out that Stevens' comment fails to blunt my 1971 policy conclusions, and my 1971 article's framework appears to have covered all cases correctly.

“the payments impact of foreign investment controls: reply.”

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.

Peter H. Lindert

Papers

Making the Most of Capital in the 21st Century

U.S. Foreign Trade and Trade Policy in the Twentieth Century

American Incomes before and after the Revolution

“the payments impact of foreign investment controls: reply.”

Revealing Failures in the History of School Finance