Cross-country Income Differences Research Articles

Does informality hinder financial development convergence?

This paper sheds light on the role of informal economy, defined as all economic activities that are hidden from official authorities for various reasons, in financial development convergence. Using panel data from 156 countries over the period of 1991–2017, we find that financial development (as measured by credit as share of GDP) tends to converge across countries over time, particularly when informality is lower. As the size of informal economy becomes larger, however, financial development convergence weakens, and eventually can turn out to be divergence. This finding suggests that policies addressing informality can help countries with lower levels of financial development catch up with the countries with more developed financial systems. It also has implications for the evolution of cross-country income differences, considering the role of financial development in economic performance. In the last part of the paper, we find evidence consistent with this. The results show that higher informality is also associated with weaker income convergence across countries over time.

Skilled Labor Productivity and Cross-Country Income Differences

This paper revisits the question of how allowing for imperfect substitution among workers with different skill levels affects the results of development accounting. We consider a range of models that nest the approaches in the literature and calibrate them to a common set of moments, including particularly evidence on the wage gains of migrants. We obtain two main results. First, human capital accounts for between one-half and three-fourths of cross-country income gaps. Second, human capital accounts for only modest variation in the relative productivity of skilled versus unskilled labor. (JEL E24, E25, J22, J23, J24, J31, J61)

Financial development and the redistributive channel of monetary policy

PurposeThis paper aims to examine the distributional channel of monetary policy (MP) and evaluate how financial development (FD) affects the transmission mechanism from MP to income inequality.Design/methodology/approachThe empirical investigation is implemented for 32 sub-Saharan African countries over the period 2000–2017, with the aid of vector autoregressions and a dynamic panel data model.FindingsThis study shows that MP has a significant impact on income inequality and the financial system plays an important role by dampening the dis-equalising effects of MP shocks. Both MP and FD directly exert redistributive effects. However, the financial system appears to wield the greatest impact and contribute more to the inequality dynamics.Practical implicationsThe policy-relevant conclusion is that the financial system is crucial for the monetary transmission mechanism and the effects of MP actions. As the economy develops financially, it may require less movement in the policy position to achieve the desired policy outcome. Also, macroeconomic stabilisation policies may not be distributionally neutral and may have a role to play in averting longer-term increases in inequality.Originality/valueContrary to previous studies, this study indicates MP by the structural shocks to purge the MP stance of the issues of endogenous and anticipatory actions. A distinctive finding of this paper is that cross-country differences in monetary regimes and income explain a significant variation in the distributional impacts of monetary policy. Notwithstanding, the evidence shows that the strength of the transmission is more dependent on FD than the nature of the policy regime.

Entrepreneurial Human Capital and Firm Dynamics

Abstract This article shows that entrepreneurial human capital is a key driver of firm dynamics using administrative panel data on the universe of firms and workers in Portugal. Firms started by more educated entrepreneurs are larger at entry and exhibit higher life cycle growth. Consistent with an effect on growth, the thickness of the right tail of the size distribution increases with entrepreneur schooling. The evidence points to several underlying mechanisms, with technology adoption playing the most important part. I develop and estimate a model of firm dynamics that can parsimoniously account for these findings and use it to draw aggregate implications. Accounting for the effect of entrepreneurial human capital on firm dynamics can substantially increase aggregate returns to schooling and the fraction of cross-country income differences explained by human and physical capital.

Income Differences, Productivity, and Input-Output Networks

We study the importance of input-output (IO) linkages and sectoral productivity (TFP) in determining cross-country income differences. We find that while highly connected sectors are more productive than the typical sector in poor countries, the opposite is true in rich ones. To assess the quantitative role of linkages and sectoral TFP differences in cross-country income differences, we decompose cross-country income variation using a multisector general equilibrium model. We find that IO linkages substantially amplify fundamental sectoral TFP variation, but this amplification is significantly weaker than the one suggested by a simple IO model with an aggregate intermediate good. (JEL D57, E16, E23, O11, O47)

Entrepreneurial Human Capital and Firm Dynamics

This paper shows that entrepreneurial human capital is a key driver of firm dynamics using administrative panel data on the universe of firms and workers in Portugal. Firms started by more educated entrepreneurs are larger at entry and exhibit higher life cycle growth. Consistent with an effect on growth, the thickness of the right tail of the size distribution increases with entrepreneur schooling. The evidence points to several underlying mechanisms, with technology adoption playing the most important part. I develop and estimate a model of firm dynamics that can parsimoniously account for these findings, and use it to draw aggregate implications. Accounting for the effect of entrepreneurial human capital on firm dynamics can substantially increase aggregate returns to schooling and the fraction of cross-country income differences explained by human and physical capital.

Education quality and the empirics of economic growth: reconciling Mankiw-Romer-Weil estimates with microeconometric evidence

ABSTRACT We extend Mankiw, Romer and Weil’s classic paper by introducing differences in education quality (proxied by students’ performance on the PISA test). This substantially reduces the role of human capital investment rates in explaining cross-country income differences. More importantly, the coefficient on this variable is now consistent with microeconometric evidence on returns to education.

Health and Economic Development from Cross-Country Perspectives

In this article, we provide a comprehensive overview of the role that health plays in economic develop­ment. We study cross-country differences in income and health and examine the underused value-of-­life and life-year gain measures. In particular, we compare two value-of-life measures, one based on life expectancy and lifetime utility, and the other based on adult mortality and life insurance data. We find that the perception and receptiveness of life insurance are likely better in countries at more advanced stages of economic development. The value-of-life measure based on life insurance data is thus biased upward and downward for developed and developing countries, respectively. We then summarize the strand of theoretical literature and provide several modeling ingredients potentially useful for establishing an integrated analytic structure for understanding the role that health plays in the process of economic development.

Firm-Embedded Productivity and Cross-Country Income Differences

We measure the contribution of firm-embedded productivity to cross-country income differences. By firm-embedded productivity we refer to the components of productivity that differ across firms and that can be transferred internationally, such as blueprints, management practices, and intangible capital. Our approach relies on micro-level data on the cross-border operations of multinational enterprises (MNEs). We compare the market shares of the exact same MNE in different countries and document that they are about four times larger in developing than in high-income coun-tries. This finding indicates that MNEs face less competition in less-developed coun-tries, suggesting that firm-embedded productivity in those countries is scarce. We propose and implement a new measure of firm-embedded productivity based on this observation. We find a strong positive correlation between our measure and output per worker across countries. In our sample, differences in firm-embedded productivity account for roughly a third of the cross-country variance in output per worker.

Does International Travel Cause Economic Growth? Evidence from China’s Deregulation on Foreigners’ Traveling

International travel has been hypothesized to shape large cross-country differences in productivity and income. However, evidence supporting this hypothesis, especially from developing countries, remains scarce. This paper fills this gap by studying a novel historical natural experiment -- China’s removal of travel restrictions on foreigners to designated Open-to-Foreigners-Counties (OFCs). Utilizing the county-by-county rollout of the OFCs, we find that removing travel restrictions on foreigners led to a 7.4 percent increase in per capita industrial output for the OFCs in 1985-1991. The positive effects are larger in counties with more foreign equipment and greater industrial human capital. We highlight the role of person-based international knowledge diffusion in the economic catch-up of technology recipient countries.

Directed technological change & cross-country income differences: A quantitative analysis

Understanding international income differences requires measuring supplies of multiple production factors and their productivity. Recent work suggests that heterogeneous workers should be treated as imperfect substitutes. Using a model of endogenous directed technological change and a new data set on labor force composition we construct productivity for workers in three skill categories for 63 countries from 1910 to 2010 (up to 83 additional countries for 1950–2010). Rich countries use all skill categories more efficiently. Poor countries have a large technology adoption wedge, which prevents them from using low-skill labor more efficiently. Reducing the technology adoption wedges would have a much larger impact on standards of living than skill upgrading of the workforce.

Financial constraints, firm productivity and cross-country income differences: Evidence from sub-Sahara Africa

Financial constraints have significant implications on firm productivity growth and cross-country income distribution. This study analyses the dynamics of firm productivity and cross-country income differences in a sample of 9 African countries using a stochastic frontier estimator on recent 2016 World Bank Enterprise Survey data. After controlling for firm heterogeneity, we find large dispersions in marginal revenue products of capital and labour and efficiencies between financially constrained and unconstrained firms. Financially constrained firms have 6.6 percent lower marginal revenue product of capital relative to unconstrained firms. Moreover, constrained firms are also more inefficient and less productive relative to unconstrained firms. Constrained firms are 15 percent less efficient due to borrowing constraints compared to unconstrained firms.

THE ROLE OF INNOVATIONS IN DRIVING ECONOMIC GROWTH: CASE OF ADVANCED ECONOMIES

The paper explores the impact of innovations on the cross-country income differences among advanced economies based on the economic and mathematical models construction. As indicator that defines level of innovations production in the country, we have used number of researchers in R&D sector (per million people). Therefore, it has been constructed panel data model to estimate the effect of number of researchers in R&D sector on GDP per capita in advanced economies. Results of estimation have shown the significant impact of researchers in R&D sector on GDP per capita for the group of advanced economies testifying that innovation really matters in driving economic growth.

BRICS Nations and Income Convergence: An Insight from the Quarterly Data for 2006Q1–2017Q2

The formation of the BRICS Group was aimed at, among others, developing parallel economic power house of the highly emerging nations and generating additional shock absorbing capacity. Maintaining equitable distribution of income and wealth among the group members, thus, was one of the top most priorities of the group. Under this backdrop, the present study examines whether the countries are converging in income leading to overall development in the group. Applying the neoclassical growth and panel unit roots models on the quarterly data from 2006Q1–2017Q2 to 2009Q1–2017Q2, the study reveals that there is no significant catching up of the countries in both the periods, but there is conditional convergence in the first period. The variables which played conditional roles are net FDI inflow and crude oil production. Further, the study observes sigma convergence among the group members in both the periods, signifying that the cross-country income differences have been going down over time.

Inventory Management, Product Quality, and Cross‑Country Income Differences

Previous research has documented that export shipments are “lumpy”— exporters make infrequent and relatively large shipments to any given export destination. This fact has been interpreted as implying that fixed, per shipment cost and inventory management decisions play a key role in international trade. We document here that exports from poor countries are considerably more lumpy—have higher fixed per shipment cost— than those from rich countries. Using a model of trade with inventory management, we estimate that the country at the ninetieth percentile of the distribution of per shipment costs has almost three times higher costs than the one at the tenth percentile. We show that these per shipment cost differences have a reduced-form representation given by an ad valorem trade cost that varies with export country income (as in Waugh 2010 ). A calibrated version of the model that incorporates these estimates and allows for endogenous product quality reveals that cross-country differences in per shipment costs explain almost 40 percent of the observed cross-country differences in income. It also shows that policies that lower per shipment costs can lead to significant welfare gains, mainly due to induced quality upgrading. (JEL F12, F14, F43, G31, O16, O19)

Directed Technological Change & Cross-Country Income Differences: A Quantitative Analysis

The first step in understanding international income differences is measuring supplies of various factors of production and their productivity. Recent work suggests that these calculations should treat workers of different skill levels as imperfect substitutes. However, under this approach, it has been challenging to compute skill-specific productivity levels for a large sample of economies. In this paper, we use a model of endogenous directed technological change together with a new data set on labor force composition to construct measures of productivity for workers in three distinct skill categories for 68 countries over the period of 1910 - 2010. We find that rich countries use labor of all skill categories more efficiently; however, in the absence of a technology adoption wedge, poor countries would, in fact, be more efficient than developed economies at using low-skill labor. This depressed low-skill productivity is responsible for large output loses. Our estimates also imply that after 1950 the world technology frontier expanded much faster for college-educated workers than for those with lower skill sets. This technology diffused to many countries, allowing even the less developed ones to experience a relatively robust growth of high-skill-specific productivity. Their GDP growth failed to reflect that because they have very few workers in the higher skilled category.

Measuring Human Capital

Students around the world are going to school but are not learning -- an emerging gap in human capital formation. To understand this gap, this paper introduces a new data set measuring learning in 164 countries and territories. The data cover 98 percent of the world's population from 2000 to 2017. The data set will be publicly available and updated annually by the World Bank. The paper presents several stylized facts in a first application of the data: (a) although enrollment has increased worldwide, learning has stagnated; (b) girls outperform boys on learning -- a positive gender gap -- in contrast to a negative gender gap observed for schooling; (c) learning is associated with growth on a global scale; (d) associations with growth are heterogenous; and (e) human capital accounts for up to a third of cross-country income differences -- a middle ground in the recent development accounting literature. These stylized facts demonstrate the potential of the data to reveal new insights into the relationship between human capital and economic development.

Labor mobility, structural change and economic growth

This paper develops a two-sector growth model in which the process of structural change in the sectoral composition of employment and GDP is jointly determined by income effects, derived from non-homothetic preferences, and by a substitution mechanism derived from a labor mobility cost. This cost, paid by workers moving to another sector, generates a sectoral wage gap that limits structural change. Our model can explain the following patterns of development of the US economy throughout the period 1880-2000: (i) balanced growth of the aggregate variables in the second half of the last century; (ii) structural change in the sectoral composition of employment between agricultural and non-agricultural sectors; (iii) structural change process in the sectoral composition of GDP between these sectors; and (iv) wage convergence between the two sectors. We outline that in the absence of wage gaps the model is not able to jointly explain the process of structural change in the sectoral composition of both GDP and employment. This cost reduces the Possibilities Production Frontier (PPF) by constraining the sectoral allocation of production factors. This implies a loss of GDP which amounts to over 30% of the GDP throughout initial periods according to the calibrated model. During the transition, the loss of GDP decreases and eventually vanishes. Thus, the elimination of this technological constraint explains part of the increase in the GDP. Additionally, this study points out that the aforementioned technological constraint introduces a mechanism through which cross-country differences in sectoral composition may account for cross-country income differences.

The Deep Determinants of the Middle-Income Trap

The fundamental, underlying factors of development are often neglected when analyzing the question why countries experience a growth slowdown at the middle-income range. Although these so-called ‘deep determinants’ such as geography and institutions have been found to be decisive for the break out of stagnation and for explaining cross-country income differences by many empirical studies, so far, very little has been done to examine to which extent they are also crucial at more subtle stages of economic development. Our paper aims to contribute to close this gap by focusing on the phenomenon of the middle-income trap (MIT) which has reached increasing attention in the last 15 years. In particular, we are interested in whether the deep determinants have positive or negative impacts on the possibility of a country to experience a prolonged stay within the middle-income range. We focus especially on exogenous variables to avoid endogeneity/reverse causality problems. By using simple statistical hypothesis testing, we show that not all findings of the deep determinants literature can be easily transferred to the MIT phenomenon, especially regarding institutional variables. This may raise the question whether we need new deep determinants of growth for the MIT or at least a modified version taking into account the specific circumstances and characteristics of middle-income countries.

The Deep Determinants at More Subtle Stages of Development: The Example of the Middle-Income Trap Phenomenon

The so-called ‘deep determinants’ of economic growth and development (namely, geography, institutions, and integration) have been found to be decisive for the break out of stagnation and for explaining cross-country income differences by many empirical studies. However, so far, very little has been done to examine to which extent they are also crucial at more subtle stages of economic development. Our paper aims to close this gap by focusing on the phenomenon of the middle-income trap (MIT) which has reached increasing attention in the last 15 years. In particular, we test whether the results of the empirical studies conducted by Acemoglu et al. (2001), Rodrik et al. (2004), and Easterly and Levine (2016) also remain valid when analyzing the MIT. We are the first to analyze the relationship between the deep determinants and the MIT, especially regarding the causal effect of institutional quality on the probability of experiencing a growth slowdown at the middle-income range. Our analysis reveals that while, in general, the deep determinants also seem to play an important role for the middle-income transition (and the question of whether a country falls into an MIT), some differences compared to the results of the standard literature become apparent.