Levels of Economic Activity Across Countries

Abstract:     
In the title of his 1989 Richard T. Ely lecture to the American Economic Association, David Landes asked, "Why are we so rich and they so poor?" It is an odd fact that the subsequent explosion of empirical work on economic growth, has rarely returned to this question, choosing to focus instead on explaining differences in average growth rates across countries, computed over several decades. In this essay and in recent research (Hall and Jones 1996), we examine economic levels instead of economic growth.

Note: This is not an abstract but is the initial paragraph of the paper.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 13

JEL Classification: E20, O11

working papers series