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Working Paper
Industrial development and the convergence question
The paper studies endogenous world balanced growth equilibria in which national learning productivity differentials govern relative per capita products. Learning productivities depend on the national share of world specialized-goods production, national and world scale, and familiarity with the foreign economy. Familiarity indexes the extent to which imported specialized goods enhance learning productivity. We find that mutual familiarization causes per capita products to converge. Unfamiliar economies diverge substantially and persistently. Unilateral familiarization of a less-developed ...
Working Paper
Early development
Long-term economic development involves four fundamental processes: the exploitation of increasing returns to specialization, the transition from household to market production, knowledge and human capital accumulation, and industrialization. In this paper, we integrate these processes into a coherent framework for thinking about economic history. Pre-industrial development is driven by increasing returns to specialization made possible by a growing population. Increasing specialization eventually activates a learning technology and initiates industrial growth, which carries the economy to a ...