世界経済・社会統計 = World development indicators

Output per worker varies enormously across countries. Why? On an accounting basis, our analysis shows that differences in physical capital and educational attainment can only partially explain the variation in output per worker--we find a large amount of variation in the level of the Solow residual across countries. At a deeper level, we document that the differences in capital accumulation, productivity, and therefore output per worker are driven by differences in institutions and government policies, which we call social infrastructure. We treat social infrastructure as endogenous, determined historically by location and other factors captured in part by language.

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Why Do Some Countries Produce so Much More Output Per Worker than Others

This paper analyzes a newly assembled data set consisting of subjective indices of corruption, the amount of red tape, the efficiency of the judicial system, and various categories of political stability for a cross section of countries. Corruption is found to lower investment, thereby lowering economic growth. The results are robust to controlling for endogeneity by using an index of ethnolinguistic fractionalization as an instrument.

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Corruption and Growth

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

Development as Freedom

Does finance affect economic growth? A number of studies have identified a positive correlation between the level of development of a country's financial sector and the rate of growth of its per capita income. As has been noted elsewhere, the observed correlation does not necessarily imply a causal relationship. This paper examines whether financial development facilitates economic growth by scrutinizing one rationale for such a relationship; that financial development reduces the costs of external finance to firms. Specifically, we ask whether industrial sectors that are relatively more in need of external finance develop disproportionately faster in countries with more developed financial markets. We find this to be true in a large sample of countries over the 1980s. We show this result is unlikely to be driven by omitted variables, outliers, or reverse causality.

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Financial Dependence and Growth

The ghost of a long-dead growth model still haunts aid to developing countries. The Harrod-Domar growth model supposedly died long ago. But for more than 40 years, economists working on developing countries have applied- still apply- Harrod-Domar model to calculate short-run investment requirements for a target growth rate. They then calculate a financing gap between the required investment and available resources and often fill the "financing gap" with foreign aid. Easterly traces the intellectual history of how a long-dead model came to influence today's aid allocation to developing countries. He asks whether the model's surprising afterlife is attributable to consistency with the 40 years of data that have accumulated during its use. The answer is "no." This paper-a product of the Development Research Group-is part of a larger effort in the group to study the determinants of economic growth.

The ghost of financing gap : how the Harrod-Domar growth model still haunts development economics

While many analysts decry the lack of sufficient investment in Africa, we find no evidence that private and public investment are productive, either in Africa as a whole (unless Botswana is included in the sample), or in the manufacturing sector in Tanzania. In this restricted sense, inadequate investment is not the major obstacle to African economic development.

/pdf/low-investment-is-not-the-constraint-on-african-development-k61qms8t7m.pdf

Low Investment is Not the Constraint on African Development

Fiscal adjustment is an illusion when it lowers the budget deficit or public debt but leaves government net worth unchanged. Conventional measures of the budget deficit largely show the change in public sector debt. Ideally, the measured deficit would reflect the change in Public sector net worth. Many people consider it impractical to try to measure public sector assets. My paper does not discuss what the deficit should measure, but instead proposes a positive and testable theory of how governments actually behave. When an outside agent forces a reduction in a government's conventional deficit and debt accumulation, the government responds by lowering asset accumulation or increasing hidden liabilities. Since government net worth is unchanged, such fiscal adjustment is an illusion. Using data from countries with World Bank and IMF fiscal adjustment programmes, and case studies of EMU countries' compliance with the Maastricht criteria, I confirm my theoretical predictions: fiscal adjustment in these countries was at least partly an illusion.

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When is fiscal adjustment an illusion

Jeffrey Sachs's new book (The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, Penguin Press: New York, 2005) advocates a "Big Push" featuring large increases in aid to finance a package of complementary investments in order to end world poverty. These recommendations are remarkably similar to those first made in the 1950s and 1960s in development economics. Today, as then, the Big Push recommendation overlooks the unsolvable information and incentive problems facing any large-scale planning exercise. A more promising approach would be to design incentives for aid agents to implement interventions piecemeal whenever they deliver large benefits for the poor relative to costs.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/30032297.pdf

The Big Push Déjà Vu: A Review of Jeffrey Sachs's The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time

The Burnside and Dollar (2000) finding that aid raises growth in a good policy environment has had an important influence on policy and academic debates. We conduct a data gathering exercise that updates their data from 1970–93 to 1970–97, as well as filling in missing data for the original period 1970–93. We find that the BD finding is not robust to the use of this additional data.

William Easterly

Papers

The ghost of financing gap : how the Harrod-Domar growth model still haunts development economics

Low Investment is Not the Constraint on African Development

When is fiscal adjustment an illusion

The Big Push Déjà Vu: A Review of Jeffrey Sachs's The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time

New Data, New Doubts: Revisiting "Aid, Policies, and Growth"