Education and economic growth

Contemporary views on the determinants of economic growth place education in centre stage. Yet the way in which education affects growth is not yet well understood. This paper begins by surveying the recent literature on the factors that affect growth, paying particular attention to education. It then proceeds to estimate a comprehensive model of growth, testing its robustness across regions of the world. Policy conclusions are drawn

Economic Growth Nonlinearities

Nonlinearities in growth have important implications for cross-country income inequality. In particular, they imply that countries may spend long periods of time in a low-growth poverty trap. However, finding evidence of such nonlinearities in the data and accounting for their emergence pose unique challenges to researchers.

British economic growth : 1270 - 1870

We provide annual estimates of GDP for England between 1270 and 1700 and for Great Britain between 1700 and 1870, constructed from the output side. The GDP data are combined with population estimates to calculate GDP per capita. We find English per capita income growth of 0.20 per cent per annum between 1270 and 1700, although growth was episodic, with the strongest growth during the Black Death crisis of the fourteenth century and in the second half of the seventeenth century. For the period 1700-1870, we find British per capita income growth of 0.48 per cent, broadly in line with the widely accepted Crafts/Harley estimates. This modest trend growth in per capita income since 1270 suggests that, working back from the present, living standards in the late medieval period were well above “bare bones subsistence”. This can be reconciled with modest levels of kilocalorie consumption per head because of the very large share of pastoral production in agriculture

Financial conditions and the risks to economic growth in the United States since 1875

We explore the historical relationship between financial conditions and real economic growth for quarterly U.S. data from 1875 to 2017 with a flexible empirical copula modelling methodology. We compare specifications with both linear and non-linear dependence, and with both Gaussian and non-Gaussian marginal distributions. Our results indicate strong statistical support for models that are both non-Gaussian and nonlinear for our historical data, with considerable heterogeneity across sub-samples. We demonstrate that ignoring the contribution of financial conditions typically understates the conditional downside risks to economic growth in crises. For example, accounting for financial conditions more than doubles the probability of negative growth in the year following the 1929 stock market crash

Governance & Economic Growth

This paper looks at some of the fundamental ideas in contemporary economics such as the basic economic problem, opportunity cost and allocation a person is expected to encounter when they are first introduced to economic theory. It attempts to explain how the manner in which these concepts are interpreted and disseminated in mainstream economics may be counter productive to the capacity of economics to develop new ways of countering scarcity. It aligns these concepts with recent unrest in Europe caused by austerity measures. The paper looks at the capacity for contemporary economics to emerge from a cocoon spun from cobwebs of antiquated thought and inhibitions in order for it find extraordinary solutions for the extraordinary economic challenges the world faces today. Accelerated economic growth in an EOS model is applied to the economy of a developed country to illustrate the faster pace at which the model can transform stock markets and economic conditions as well as an illustration of how the current model may not exploit the full potential for market capitalisation businesses could have. In addition to this the paper addresses the ability of workers to take control of their finances through a concept concerning the capitalisation of their labour. A labour capitalisation fund allows employees to have their projected lifetime earnings paid up front and invested for the duration of their working life. It improves the relationship between capital and labour, frees up financial resources for governments and creates a new lucrative financial product for banks and other institutions in the financial services industry.Scarcity; banking; credit creation; labour; banks; market capitalisation; resource creation; implosion; wobble effect; unemployment; economic thought; poverty; wealth; equation of exchange; market efficiency; stock market; money; price; mark-up; cost plus pricing; rationality; operating level economics; economic growth; expenditure fallacy; paradox.

Does Immigration Increase Economic Growth?

The question of how many legal immigrants should be admitted to the United States -- and what level of skills these immigrants should have --is among the most divisive issues in the current U.S. domestic policy landscape. Much of the controversy that it sparks can be traced to a single question: Do immigrants help or harm the economy?This paper reviews scholarly literature and examines government data on immigration's contribution to economic growth and finds that both high- and low-skill immigration, on net, boosts economic growth. The paper concludes with a series of pro-growth, long-term policy reforms that Congress would do well to include in immigration reform legislation.  (This is not to imply an endorsement of the granting of legal status to nonlegal immigrants by executive action, as pledged by the White House at the time of the release of this report.

Water and Economic Growth

Several hydrological studies forecast a global problem of water scarcity. This raises the question as to whether increasing water scarcity may impose constraints on the growth of countries. The influence of water utilization on economic growth is depicted through a growth model that includes this congestible public good as a productive input for private producers. Growth is negatively affected by the government's appropriation of output to supply water but positively influenced by the contribution of increased water use to capital productivity, leading to an inverted-U relationship between economic growth and the rate of water utilization. Crosscountry estimations confirm this relationship and suggest that for most economies current rates of freshwater utilization are not yet constraining growth. However, for a handful of countries, moderate or extreme water scarcity may affect economic growth adversely. Nevertheless, even for water-scarce countries, there appears to be little evidence that there are severe diminishing returns to allocating more output to provide water, thus resulting in falling income per capita. These results suggest caution over the claims of some hydrological-based studies of a widespread global "water crisis".Congestible public goods, cross-country regressions, economic growth, freshwater, water scarcity.