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

Some scholars suggest that the Middle East's oil wealth helps explain its failure to democratize. This article examines three aspects of this “oil impedes democracy” claim. First, is it true? Does oil have a consistendy antidemocratic effect on states, once other factors are accounted for? Second, can this claim be generalized? Is it true only in the Middle East or elsewhere as well? Is it true for other types of mineral wealth and other types of commodity wealth or only for oil? Finally, if oil does have antidemocratic properties, what is the causal mechanism?The author uses pooled time-series cross-national data from 113 states between 1971 and 1997 to show that oil exports are strongly associated with authoritarian rule; that this effect is not limited to the Middle East; and that other types of mineral exports have a similar antidemocratic effect, while other types of commodity exports do not.The author also tests three explanations for this pattern: a “rentier effect,” which suggests that resource-rich governments use low tax rates and patronage to dampen democratic pressures; a “repression effect,” which holds that resource wealth enables governments to strengthen their internal security forces and hence repress popular movements; and a “modernization effect,” which implies that growth that is based on the export of oil and minerals will fail to bring about die social and cultural changes that tend to produce democratic government. He finds at least limited support for all three effects.

Does Oil Hinder Democracy

where A represents the magnetic vector potential, is an integral of the hydromagnetic equations. This -integral made it possible to formulate a variational principle for the force-free magnetic fields. The integral expresses the fact that motions cannot transform a given field in an entirely arbitrary different field, if the conductivity of the medium isconsidered infinite. In this paper we shall show that the full set of hydromagnetic equations admit five more integrals, besides the energy integral, if dissipative processes are absent. These integrals, as we shall presently verify, are I2 =fbHvdV, (2)

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

It is widely believed that current disparities in economic, political, and social outcomes reflect distinct institutions. Institutions are invoked to explain why some countries are rich and others poor, some democratic and others dictatorial. But arguments of this sort gloss over the question of what institutions are, how they come about, and why they persist. They also fail to explain why institutions are influenced by the past, why it is that they can sometimes change, why they differ so much from society to society, and why it is hard to study them empirically and devise a policy aimed at altering them. This 2006 book seeks to overcome these problems, which have exercised economists, sociologists, political scientists, and a host of other researchers who use the social sciences to study history, law, and business administration. It presents a multi-disciplinary perspective to study endogenous institutions and their dynamics.

/pdf/institutions-and-the-path-to-the-modern-economy-4dlla029fs.pdf

Institutions and the path to the modern economy

Virtually all models of the household assume that the allocation of resources is Pareto efficient. Within many African households, agricultural production occurs on many plots controlled by different members of the household. Pareto efficiency implies that factors should be allocated efficiently across these plots. I find, in contrast, that plots controlled by women are farmed much less intensively than similar plots within the household controlled by men. The estimates imply that about 6 percent of output is lost because of inefficient factor allocation within the household. The paper suggests a new approach to modeling intrahousehold allocation consistent with the empirical results.

/pdf/gender-agricultural-production-and-the-theory-of-the-2qev0ck25u.pdf

Gender, Agricultural Production, and the Theory of the Household

Historical research can contribute to greater understanding of economic growth, but only if it proceeds without theoretical blinders and assumptions imposed by past definitions of capitalism. We will make this case, by taking one particular historical example—mortgage markets in nineteenth-century France—and analyzing the financial development that accompanied the rise of capitalism there. The French example demonstrates that there is an immense amount that historians and social scientists still do not know about economic growth or capitalism. One common assumption is that little financing takes place before big banks and other modern financial institutions arrive on the scene. No one, however, has ever tested this implicit assumption by estimating how much lending or other financial dealing occurred before the arrival of the banks and modern financial institutions in developed economies. Although scholars have studied financial dealings back into the Middle Ages or before, no one knows whether the sums involved were big or small. We do so and discover that the sums involved were enormous. That so much borrowing went on outside modern financial institutions raises serious doubts about the argument that connects financial development and economic growth. Our research also makes it clear that context was critical when entrepreneurs raised money in the early stages of economic growth or when young businesses or firms in new industries sought funds.

/pdf/capitalism-and-financial-development-the-case-of-mortgage-4y7lkn81zo.pdf

Capitalism and Financial Development: The Case of Mortgage Markets in France, 1807-1899

Information and Economic History: How the Credit Market in Old Regime Paris Forces Us to Rethink

Fiscal regimes have become progressively more centralized and though the trend extends over nearly a millennium, the process accelerated in the early nineteenth century. The growth of central government budgets as a fraction of the economy and relative to local and regional budgets is well known. Many believe that the process has been driven by changes in citizens' demand for social services and therefore have associated it with democratization and with crises such as World War I and the Great Depression. In this paper we take a different tack and consider the evolution of fiscal institutions and changes in the preferences of the central executive. Our reconsideration is prompted by the observation that from and institutional standpoint fiscal centralization long preceded the massive expansion of the welfare state in the twentieth century.

SESSION 2B: WARS AND STRUCTURE OF GOVERNMENT Wars and the Evolution of Fiscal Regimes in Europe, 1700???2000

Financial intermediaries in europe

This paper employs maximum likelihood methods to analyze the increase in pious bequests in early modern French wills Other historians have described the rise of pious bequests in wills, but no one has used multivariate statistical methods to explain the phenomenon It turns out that at any level of wealth pious bequests rose over the course of the seventeenth century and that the bequests were most pronounced among the literate and women The paper argues that the increase in pious bequests was mark of growing support for the Counter Reformation, which attracted an inordinate number of supporters in educated circles and in the female population

Philip T. Hoffman

Papers

Capitalism and Financial Development: The Case of Mortgage Markets in France, 1807-1899

Information and Economic History: How the Credit Market in Old Regime Paris Forces Us to Rethink

SESSION 2B: WARS AND STRUCTURE OF GOVERNMENT Wars and the Evolution of Fiscal Regimes in Europe, 1700???2000

Financial intermediaries in europe

Pious Bequests in Wills: A Statistical Analysis