Capital internacional e mobilidade da mão de obra: vazão para o trabalho excedente?

The paper discusses the effects of international capital and labor mobility in a North-South setting. It shows that the word capital stock and Southern employment in the modern sector expands in proportion to the migration quota imposed by the North. On the other hand, international capital mobility results in a contraction of the word economy under a "reasonable assumption".Este artigo discute os efeitos da mobilidade do capital internacional e da mão de obra em um contexto norte-sul. Demonstra-se que o estoque de capital mundial e o emprego no setor moderno do Sul expandem-se em proporção a quota de imigração imposta pelo norte. Por outro lado, a mobilidade do capital internacional resulta nacontração da economia mundial, sob uma "hipótese razoável"

Divided We Stand, United We Fall: The Hume-Weber-Jones Mechanism for the Rise of Europe

The great divergence in incomes between Europe and the rest of the world occurred relatively recently. Why was it that Western Europe, once a backward outpost on the fringes of the Eurasian continent, able to dominate in terms of income and technology the previously successful Eastern economies? Several mechanisms have been identiÞed to account for the rise of Europe. This pa-per formalizes one important mechanism, the intellectual origins of which can be traced back to Hume and Weber and which was fully, though informally, articulated by E.L. Jones. This mechanism emphasizes the contrast between the European states-system and the Eastern empires. Political competition for a mobile tax-base in a states-system forces rulers to expropriate less from their subjects and to supply relatively more public services. By effectively limiting the exit options of the ruled, an empire rewards its ruler with a captive tax-base that can be subjected to relatively higher levels of expropri-ation without a similar rise in public services provided. The states-system thus encourages higher levels of capital accumulation, while the empire stißes it. The successes of the Eastern empires in their consolidation phase are due to the competition they initially faced from neighboring states. Since Europe escaped such consolidation, the process of accumulation there never faced the impediments its Eastern counterparts did. The paper, thus, also provides a structural explanation for the emergence of institutions in Europe that led to relatively secure property rights. ∗I would like to thank Andre Burgstaller, Ronald Findlay, Mira Wilkins, and participants of the 2004 Lucca Conference on Economic Growth and Distribution for helpful comments. All remaining errors are mine.

INCOME DISTRIBUTION, SOVEREIGN DEBT, AND PUBLIC INVESTMENT

We develop a political economy model of sovereign debt that shows that income inequality leads to popular pressures on the government to use foreign debt to finance a redistribution of income at the expense of productive public investment. Recognizing this fact, international lenders impose credit ceilings with the consequence that developing country borrowers invest less and grow slower

Trade in Goods and Trade in Assets

Abstract A two-good, two-country intertemporal general equilibrium model of pure exchange is presented, in which whatever causes intratemporal trade also causes intertemporal trade, so that simple textbook separability fails. The framework allows financial market phenomena such as international yield arbitrage, portfolio composition shifts, and capital-flow-financed current account deficits to interact dynamically with the real phenomena of pure exchange