(Very) "Long-Run Performance"
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Divergence, Big Time.
- Journal of Economic Perspectives. This is the only paper I have written on the topic of the long-run truly massive divergence in per capita incomes between the world's now rich and the world's poorest countries. To some extent this is a well known "fact" going back at least to Kuznets, but is hard to document and the principal value added of the paper is the attempt to document the "lower bound" on incomes that allow us to calculate some estimates of the magnitude of divergence.
- (By the way, this does not enter in the recent controversy about whether "world inequality" is going up or down recently, which a very simply issue really. India and China are growing quite fast, and, unlike nearly any other country, faster that they grew in the 1960-80 period. Therefore is one uses the country as the unit of observation the gaps across countries are getting larger but if one uses the typical world person then of course India and China matter enormously and the gap amongst persons could be getting smaller even if only two countries are growing).
- Journal of Economic Perspectives. This is the only paper I have written on the topic of the long-run truly massive divergence in per capita incomes between the world's now rich and the world's poorest countries. To some extent this is a well known "fact" going back at least to Kuznets, but is hard to document and the principal value added of the paper is the attempt to document the "lower bound" on incomes that allow us to calculate some estimates of the magnitude of divergence.
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The Once (and Future) Distribution of World Income.
- This paper was published in 1997 a French journal. The first half is "divergence, big time" but the second half is an examination of the possible future of the distribution of income under various scenarios about growth--with simulations of the "stages of growth" model in which eventually every country passes a "take-off" level of income and grows rapidly (and hence after divergence there is convergence) or a "only contiguous learning" model in which the laggards do not have an "advantage of backwardness" and hence more divergence in the future. The second half is a "states and transitions" model of growth.