We study the effect of international business trips on the productivity of twelve Australian industries during 1991/2–2005/6.We find strong positive effects, particularly for departing, rather than ...incoming, international visits. This result supports viewing business visits as investments rather than expenditures.
► International business trips strongly positively affect Australia’s productivity. ► Effects are stronger for departing than incoming visitors. ► Results support viewing visits as investments rather than expenditures.
Did global income inequality rise or fall over the last decades of the twentieth century? The answer depends on how cross‐country income comparisons are made. Exchange rate comparisons suggest that ...inequality rose whilst the purchasing power comparisons of the Penn World Table suggest it fell. We show that both measures of real incomes lead to biased international income comparisons. Exchange rate comparisons ignore the relative price of non‐tradables, whilst the fixed price method underlying the Penn World Table is subject to substitution bias. The contradictory trends are due to growing dissimilarity between national price structures increasing the degree of bias in each method. When we correct the income data to eliminate bias we find no compelling evidence of a significant change in world inequality.
The development of the endogenous growth model rekindled interest in growth theory. In contrast to the neo-classical model, long-run endogenous growth emerged as an equilibrium outcome, reflecting ...the behaviour of optimizing agents in the economy. This book brings together a number of contributions in growth theory and macroeconomic dynamics, reflecting these developments and the ongoing debate over the relative merits of neo-classical and endogenous growth models. It focuses on the emergence of three important aspects: First, it develops growth models that extend the underlying theory in different directions. Second, it addresses one of the concerns of the literature on growth and dynamics: the statistical properties of underlying data and the effort to ensure that growth models are consistent with empirical evidence. Third, it discusses the increasingly international focus of macrodynamics and growth theory, an inevitable consequence of the integration of the world economy.
We present theory and evidence to suggest that, in the context of analyzing global poverty, the EKS approach to estimating purchasing power parities yields more appropriate international comparison ...of real incomes than the Geary-Khamis approach. Our analysis of the 1996 and 2005 International Comparison Project data confirms that the Geary-Khamis approach substantially overstates the relative incomes of the world's poorest nations, and this leads to misleading comparisons of poverty across regions and over time. The EKS index of real income is much closer to being a true index of economic welfare and is therefore preferred for assessment of global poverty.
We investigate the relationship between economic growth and foreign trade, testing whether the benefits of trade vary over time and across countries. Our results confirm previous findings that ...specialization in primary exports is bad for growth. While trade openness promoted convergence in the 1960s and 1970s, we find that since 1980 the benefits of trade accrued mostly to the richer economies, with little benefit to the less developed economies. Most of the dynamic benefits of trade are obtained through productivity growth, with a small contribution coming through increased investment.
Recent modelling of endogenous growth allows for both endogenous creation of ideas for new technology through R&D and endogenous accumulation of human capital. This paper extends the literature by ...addressing two counterfactual predictions and reconsidering the need for a policy trade-off where R&D and human capital formation draw on the same resources. Our two-knowledge-sector model of endogenous growth allows R&D and human capital formation to use the same inputs and returns to scale to vary across sectors. We find that growth in ideas will outstrip growth in individual skill even if population growth ceases, the level of per capita income is increasing in technology and reallocating resources to R&D unambiguously raises growth in per capita income.
What entices the stork? Day, Creina; Dowrick, Steve
Economic record,
September 2010, Letnik:
86, Številka:
Special issue
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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Developed economies, experiencing concomitant declining fertility and rising educational attainment, have introduced policies to boost fertility. We model substitution of bought‐in services for ...parental time in the rearing and education of children in an economy where technological progress leads households to choose fewer, but better educated, children. We analyse the effects on fertility and education of a baby bonus, paid maternity leave and child‐care subsidies. We establish conditions under which either maternity or child‐care benefits are more efficacious in raising fertility, and we establish that a lump sum baby bonus will increase fertility only if the bonus increases faster than income per capita. Policies that stimulate fertility also raise parental investment in education per child.
Versions 5.6 and 6.1 of the Penn World Table contain errors in the demographic data underlying some series for population, real GDP per capita and real GDP per worker. Evidence and methods for ...correction are presented.
Recent investigations into cross‐country convergence follow Mankiw, Romer, and Weil (1992) in using a log‐linear approximation to the Swan‐Solow growth model to specify regressions. These studies ...tend to assume a common and exogenous technology. In contrast, the technology catch‐up literature endogenises the growth of technology. The use of capital stock data renders the approximations and over‐identification of the Mankiw model unnecessary and enables us, using dynamic panel estimation, to estimate the separate contributions of diminishing returns and technology transfer to the rate of conditional convergence. We find that both effects are important.
This article contributes to the debate over the empirical relationship between trade openness and economic development. Unlike previous studies which treat trade openness and institutions as ...competitors in economic development, we find evidence that they are in fact complements. We also find that in order for a country to benefit from trade, its institutional quality has to be above a certain threshold level. These results are suggestive of an important complementary role for trade openness and institutions in economic development.
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