Abstract: Five decades ago, Simon Kuznets expressed an important hypothesis
about the relationship between the degree of income inequality within a
country and its level of economic development: the Kuznets’s inverted-U
hypothesis. The lack of longitudinal data has forced the use of crosssection
or pooled datasets in order to draw conclusions about that
relationship. In the present note we highlight the lack of international
comparability of surveys where the measures of inequality are based, and
we show two main findings: (1) data comparability goes on constituting a
problem, particularly in what respects to the different welfare indicators
used in national surveys, and (2) the procedure usually used to minimize
the problem of noncomparability is likely to enforce the bias rather than to
solve it.
Abstract: Why is it so difficult for many economies, and why does it seem so easy for a couple of others, to achieve economic convergence with the living standards prevailing in advanced countries? This paper aims at answering this question, analysing the performance of the high growth developing countries and the way they developed institutional innovations. The paper puts forth some stylised facts and three main conclusions: a) Successful reforms are those that put together sound economic principles and local capabilities, constraints and opportunities; b) Economic growth is not the natural order of things, and setting up a fair and levelled ground may not be enough to stimulate productive dynamism; c) Institutional innovation requires a pragmatic approach that avoids ideological lock-in.
Abstract: This paper estimates the parameters of the ideas production function crucial to recent ideas-driven growth models. Using U. S. patents granted to residents in OECD countries to generate the stock of commercially used ideas, we provide evidence for two main findings. First, at the level of the production of ideas, we find evidence of increasing returns to scale in the stock of ideas and number of researchers, but marginal decreasing returns in each one of these factors. Second, we provide evidence of the association between ideas growth and economic growth for the OECD as a whole in the long run. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin/Heidelberg 2005
