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

Countries which stabilize from high inflation – here defined as an annual rate above 40% – usually have output expansions in the first and subsequent years of stabilization. These expansions occur in both exchange-rate-based and money-based stabilizations. The paper reaches these conclusions after examining a sample of all 28 episodes in the international data that meet a pre-defined criterion for stabilization from high inflation. The results do not change with alternative growth and stabilization definitions. The paper documents similar expansionary stabilizations in historical data and in the recent experience of the former Communist economies. Expansionary stabilizations may be an indirect confirmation of recent theories of political economy that predict that stabilization will not occur until the gains are very large.

—William Easterly

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When is stabilization expansionary? Evidence from high inflation

Many analysts decry the lack of sufficient investment in Africa, implying that investment in Africa is ‘too low’. We find no evidence that private and public capital are productive in Africa, either in the cross‐country data or in micro‐data from Tanzania. In this restricted sense, investment in Africa is too high rather than too low.

Is Investment in Africa Too High or Too Low? Macro‐ and Micro‐evidence

The mere mention of a “cartel” usually strikes fear in the hearts and wallets of consumers and regulators around the globe. Though the term normally evokes images of greedy oil producers or murderous drug lords, a new, more well-intentioned cartel has emerged on the global scene. Its members are the world’s leading foreign aid organizations, which constitute a near monopoly relative to the powerless poor.

The Cartel of Good Intentions

National economic policies’ effects on growth were over-emphasized in the early literature on endogenous economic growth. Most of the early theoretical models of the new growth literature (and even their new neoclassical counterparts) predicted large policy effects, which was followed by empirical work showing large effects. A reappraisal finds that the alleged association between growth and policies does not explain many stylized facts of the postwar era, depends on the extreme policy observations, that the association is not robust to different estimation methods (pooled vs. fixed effects vs. cross-section), does not show up as expected in event studies of trade openings and inflation stabilizations, and is driven out by institutional variables in levels regressions.

National Policies and Economic Growth: A Reappraisal

What Works in Development? brings together leading experts to address one of the most basic yet vexing issues in development: what do we really know about what works -- and what doesn't --in fighting global poverty? The contributors, including many of the world's most respected economic development analysts, focus on the ongoing debate over which paths to development truly maximize results. Should we emphasize a big-picture approach --focusing on the role of institutions, macroeconomic policies, growth strategies, and other country-level factors? Or is a more grassroots approach the way to go, with the focus on particular microeconomic interventions such as conditional cash transfers, bed nets, and other microlevel improvements in service delivery on the ground? The book attempts to find a consensus on which approach is likely to be more effective. Contributors include Nana Ashraf (Harvard Business School), Abhijit Banerjee (MIT), Nancy Birdsall (Center for Global Development), Anne Case (Princeton University), Jessica Cohen (Brookings),William Easterly (NYU and Brookings),Alaka Halla (Innovations for Poverty Action), Ricardo Hausman (Harvard University), Simon Johnson (MIT), Peter Klenow (Stanford University), Michael Kremer (Harvard), Ross Levine (Brown University), Sendhil Mullainathan (Harvard), Ben Olken (MIT), Lant Pritchett (Harvard), Martin Ravallion (World Bank), Dani Rodrik (Harvard), Paul Romer (Stanford University), and DavidWeil (Brown).

William Easterly

Papers

When is stabilization expansionary? Evidence from high inflation

Is Investment in Africa Too High or Too Low? Macro‐ and Micro‐evidence

The Cartel of Good Intentions

National Policies and Economic Growth: A Reappraisal

What Works in Development?: Thinking Big and Thinking Small