We present an endogenous growth model with externalities of capital and elastic labor supply where we allow for public debt and welfare-enhancing public spending. We analyze different debt policies ...as regards convergence to a balanced growth path and their effects on long-run growth and welfare. Three budgetary rules are considered: the balanced budget rule, a budgetary rule where debt grows in the long run but at a rate lower than the balanced growth rate and a rule where public debt grows at the same rate as all other economic variables but where it guarantees that the intertemporal budget constraint is fulfilled.
In economics, the emergence of New Growth Theory in recent decades has directed attention to an old and important problem: what are the forces of economic growth and how can public policy enhance ...them? This book examines major forces of growth--including spillover effects and externalities, education and formation of human capital, knowledge creation through deliberate research efforts, and public infrastructure investment. Unique in emphasizing the importance of different forces for particular stages of development, it offers wide-ranging policy implications in the process.
The authors critically examine recently developed endogenous growth models, study the dynamic implications of modified models, and test the models empirically with modern time series methods that avoid the perils of heterogeneity in cross-country studies. Their empirical analyses, undertaken with newly constructed time series data for the United States and some core countries of the Euro zone, show that models containing scale effects, such as the R&D model and the human capital model, are compatible with time series evidence only after considerable modifications and nonlinearities are introduced. They also explore the relationship between growth and inequality, with particular focus on technological change and income disparity.The Forces of Economic Growthrepresents a comprehensive and up-to-date empirical time series perspective on the New Growth Theory.
The European Union has set up a fund in order to compensate countries for damages resulting from Covid-19 that hit the economies in an asymmetric way. We argue that payments should be based only on ...relative damages, expressed as losses relative to GDP, and any distribution mechanism implying that damages in the countries are treated differently is discriminatory. Hence, we compute the compensation payments if the resources of the fund are spent according to the relative loss in GDP. Finally, we compare the compensations relative to the losses in GDP, resulting from the application of that principle, with those obtained by distributing the funds as suggested by the Council of the European Union. Our results provide evidence of discrimination by the EU Covid-19 compensation package.
This paper presents an endogenous growth model with human capital, where human capital formation is the result of public education. The government finances expenditures in the schooling sector by the ...tax revenue and by public deficit. In addition, the government sets the primary surplus such that it is a positive linear function of public debt which guarantees that public debt is sustainable. The paper analyzes the structure of the growth model and derives implications of public debt. Further, a sensitivity analysis of the dynamics of the model is presented and it turns out that the parameter determining the reaction of the primary surplus to changes in public debt is decisive as concerns stability of the model.
We develop an economic growth model that incorporates anthropogenic climate change and a publicly funded research sector that creates new technologies and simultaneously expands the productivities of ...existing technologies. Greenhouse gas emissions are affected by R&D activities both negatively, through the increase of output from productivity growth, and positively as new technologies are less polluting. We find that there may exist two different steady-states of the economy, depending on the amount of research spending: one with less new technologies being developed and the other with more technologies. Thus, a lock-in effect can arise that, however, can be overcome by raising R&D spending sufficiently such that the steady-state becomes unique. We derive the combinations of fiscal policy instruments for which that can be achieved and we study the implications for the economy and with respect to emissions. In particular, the double dividend hypothesis may hold under some specific conditions.
In this paper we analyze the dynamics of an R&D differential game allowing for technological spillovers and sigmoid learning functions of multiproduct oligopolies. We demonstrate how the presence of ...learning together with spillovers may generate a rich set of outcomes, varying from constant leadership to catching-up and falling behind as well as from technology lock-in to a situation with a large number of high quality products. These types of outcomes are qualitatively different both from the single firm dynamics with learning and from the duopoly case with spillovers and without learning.
Since December 2020 vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 virus have been available. However, little is known regarding their effects on infections and on hospitalizations. To gain insight into this topic ...we empirically analyze the effects of the vaccinations against SARS-CoV-2 for European countries beginning 2021 to February 2022 with weekly data. We perform panel fixed effects estimations, GMM estimations and nonlinear penalized spline estimations. We find a statistically significant and positive relationship between the share of infections with the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the share of vaccinated people in nine estimations while one estimation output was insignificant. Regarding hospitalizations, six out of ten estimations yielded a statistically insignificant relationship, and three estimation results were weakly statistically significant with a negative coefficient and one indicated a statistically significant negative relation. Hence, there is empirical evidence for a positive relationship between infections and the share of vaccinated people whereas we find weak empirical evidence for a negative relation between vaccinations and hospitalizations. The implication of our analysis is that vaccinations alone cannot end the pandemic. Rather developing effective medicines should be seen as an additional measure.
This paper empirically studies non-linearities in debt sustainability analysis by resorting to the modern estimation technique of panel smooth transition regression (PSTR). We assess euro area debt ...sustainability by analysing the reaction of the primary balance to changes in public debt, relative to GDP respectively, in annual frequency from 2000–2019 in a panel framework. The PSTR allows to estimate the existence of a threshold in the behaviour of the reaction function, refrains from the country-wise perspective and applies a regime-switching model to detect non-linearities. Data is segregated into different regimes endogenously via a logistic regression. Our results show that there are two different regimes in the euro area: a high and a low debt regime. The estimated reaction coefficient for the low debt regime is statistically insignificant, whereas it is positive and statistically significant for the high debt regime. Further, for a sub-sample of highly indebted economies we find a statistically significant negative (positive) reaction coefficient for the low (high) debt regime.
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