What’s the big idea? The main point of many of these papers is that the standard approach to understanding growth and investigating its growth determinants was some combination of the Solow-Swan model and growth regressions was a badly flawed approach to understanding the growth of developing countries.
Papers
“Divergence, Big Time.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 11 no.3, Summer 1997. At the time there was a big deal of whether or not growth showed convergence in levels or “conditional convergence” (e.g. convergence (e.g. lagged level of income was negative (slower growth for richer places) conditioning on covariates). This paper was just a reminder that the basic fact, which economics should have a good explanation for, was the massive unconditional convergence of modern economic growth, in which a small-ish set of countries embarked on steady roughly 2 percent per capita growth and have massive increases in GDP per capita while most other countries had much slower (even near zero) growth from, say, 1870 onwards. The main trick was to get around the lack of historical data (which biased previous results) by using the fact that there is some minimal threshold of GDP per capita and hence an upper bound on historical growth rates is the growth from this minimum to the current level. For currently poor countries this is much, much, less than 2 percent per annum. So all that is really needed to document the massive (“big time”) divergence is rich country growth, a lower bound on GDP per capita, and countries current levels.
“Growth Accelerations.” Journal of Economic Growth, vol. 10, no. 4, 2005. (also NBER Working Paper 10566). (with Ricardo Hausmann and Dani Rodrik).
“The Varieties of Rentier Experience: How Natural Resource Endowments Affect the Political Economy of Resource Growth.” World Bank Economic Review 11(2),2005. (with Jon Isham and Michael Woolcock).
Economic Growth in the 1990s: Learning from a Decade of Reform. (chapter 2 “Grist and Mill for the Lessons of the 1990s” and chapter 8 “The Impact of Policy Reforms on Performance and Growth: What Have We Learned from the 1990s). World Bank, 2004.
“A Toy Collection, a Socialist Star and a Democratic Dud: Growth Theory, Vietnam, and the Philippines.” in In Search of Prosperity: Analytical Narratives on Economic Growth, Dani Rodrik (ed.), Princeton University Press, 2003.
“A Conclusion to Cross National Growth Research: Foreword ‘To the Countries Themselves.’” in Explaining Growth: A Global Research Project. Gary McMahon and Lyn Squire eds., 2003.
“The Structural Adjustment Debate.” American Economic Review, vol. 83 no.2, May 1993. (with Lawrence Summers).
“The Tyranny of Concepts: CUDIE (Cumulated, Depreciated, Investment Effort) is Not Capital.” Journal of Economic Growth, December 2000.