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

High-quality institutions -- reflected in such factors as rule of law, bureaucratic quality, freedom from government expropriation, and freedom from government repudiation of contracts -- mitigate the adverse economic effects of ethnic fractionalization identified by Easterly and Levine (1997) and others. Ethnic diversity has a more adverse effect on economic policy and growth when a government's institutions are poor. But poor institutions have an even more adverse effect on growth and policy when ethnic diversity is high. In countries where the institutions are good enough, however, ethnic diversity does not lessen growth or worsen economic policies. Good institutions also reduce the risk of wars and genocides that might otherwise result from ethnic fractionalization. However, these forms of violence are not the channel through which ethnic fragmentation and its interaction with institutions affect economic growth. Ethnically diverse nations that want to endure in peace and prosperity must build good institutions.

Can institutions resolve ethnic conflict

Over the last century, global poverty has largely been viewed as a technical problem that merely requires the right "expert" solutions. Yet all too often, experts recommend solutions that fix immediate problems without addressing the systemic political factors that created them in the first place. Further, they produce an accidental collusion with "benevolent autocrats," leaving dictators with yet more power to violate the rights of the poor. In The Tyranny of Experts, economist William Easterly, bestselling author of The White Man's Burden, traces the history of the fight against global poverty, showing not only how these tactics have trampled the individual freedom of the world's poor, but how in doing so have suppressed a vital debate about an alternative approach to solving poverty: freedom. Presenting a wealth of cutting-edge economic research, Easterly argues that only a new model of development-one predicated on respect for the individual rights of people in developing countries, that understands that unchecked state power is the problem and not the solution -will be capable of ending global poverty once and for all.

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor

The Burnside and Dollar (2000, AER) 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 Burnside and Dollar (2002, AER) finding is not robust to the use of this additional data.

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New Data, New doubts: A Comment on Burnside and Dollar's "Aid, Policies, and Growth" (2000)

This article summarizes the simple analytics of the macroeconomic effects of government budget deficits. The presentation is organized around three key relationships: the national income accounts budget deficit identity, the deficit financing identity, and the dynamic equation for the evolution of the ratio of public debt to gross national product. The national income accounts identity highlights the effect of the deficit on domestic saving and investment and the current account. Examining the financing of the deficit brings to light the different kinds of macroeconomic imbalance the deficit can cause-as a first approximation, printing money excessively shows up as inflation, excessive use of foreign reserves leads to crises in the balance of payments, high foreign borrowing leads to a debt crisis, and too much domestic borrowing leads to high real interest rates and crowding out of private investment. The debt dynamics equation is used to show the long-run constraints on fiscal policy.

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The economics of the government budget constraint

Using polling data for 31,869 households in 38 countries, and allowing for country effects, the authors show that the poor are more likely than the rich to mention inflation as a top national concern. This result survives several robustness checks. Also, direct measures of improvements in well-being for the poor - the change in their share of national income, the percentage decline in poverty, and the percentage change in the real minimum wage - are negatively correlated with inflation in pooled cross-country samples. High inflation tends to lower the share of the bottom quintile and the real minimum wage - and tends to increase poverty.

William Easterly

Papers

Can institutions resolve ethnic conflict

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor

New Data, New doubts: A Comment on Burnside and Dollar's "Aid, Policies, and Growth" (2000)

The economics of the government budget constraint

Inflation and the poor