Growth Correlates

I myself am guilty of examining the determinants of differences in growth rates and in even running the occasional growth regression.

• Does learning to add up add up? The returns to schooling in aggregate data.
  This is a draft chapter for the forthcoming Handbook of Education Economics and addresses the question of whether the cross national data on the growth of output (GDP per worker) are consistent with the microeconomic (Mincer regression) data on the returns to schooling. (see more detail in the Education page).

• I presented this paper recently at the Indian Statistical Institute (Does Learning to Add up Add up_ISI.ppt).

• Disintegration and the Proliferation of Sovereigns: Are There Lessons for Integration?
  (with Matias Braun and Ricardo Hausmann). (June 2002). This paper does an episodic analysis of the impact of political independence--with an eye towards the lessons for proposals for "integration." Since with "deep integration" there is a question of ceding sovereignty (in the sense of a reducing the discretionary control over decisions--the question is whether that is, on average sovereignty is a good or bad thing. We use comparisons of growth rates of countries before and after their political independence to a "control" group and find that, on average, political independence has caused countries to grow more slowly than the OECD.

• The Varieties of the Resource Experience
  (with Michael Woolcock and Jon Isham) an empirical paper demonstrating a link between resource export composition and poor governance--this distinguishes not just manufactures from "natural resource" but among natural resource exports between "point source" (e.g. oil, diamonds) and "diffuse" (e.g. wheat). The argument is, that for a variety of reasons concentrated natural resources are bad for "institutions" (similar to the arguments of Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson and Sokoloff).

• Where has all the education gone?
  World Bank Economic Review 15(3) This is the only article I have written on this topic, but this is a pressing issue. That is, it has been a commonplace of the development literature since the 1950s that education was a key to development. Many believed that education was "extra good" in that it conveyed powerful externalities (hence creating a normative rationale for some government subsidy--but see above). However, as this paper shows it is very difficult to make the data show that education has been a panacea--or even that the return estimated from macroeconomic data is larger than would be expected from the microeconomic returns commonly estimated from household data. (World Bank Economic Review web site).