Income per-capita across-countries: Stories of catching-up, stagnation, and  laggardness

Juan Perilla Jimenez

Income per-capita across-countries: Stories of catching-up, stagnation, and laggardness

Juan Perilla Jimenez

Research output: Working paper / Preprint › Working paper

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Abstract

A sample of 131 countries is classified into those at the frontier (24 OECD countries), and those that over the 1950-2019 period managed to catching-up, remained stagnant, or kept lagging further behind.
Time-distance to the frontier suggests that successful catching-up has been already completed by some countries. But it would take no less than
27 years and as much as 194 years in the most optimistic scenario for other countries. The comparative analysis reveals patterns of (unconditional) convergence, secular stagnation and divergence characterized by differences in the approach to local innovation and technology diffusion from abroad, jointly with the ability to take advantage of economies of scale.

Original language	English
Publication status	Published - 10 Oct 2022

Publication series

Series	UNU-MERIT Working Papers
Number	033
ISSN	1871-9872

JEL classifications

o11 - Macroeconomic Analyses of Economic Development
o47 - "Measurement of Economic Growth; Aggregate Productivity; Cross-Country Output Convergence"
o57 - Comparative Studies of Countries

Keywords

Economic development
technology change
Economic Growth

Access to Document

wp2022-033Final published version, 1.08 MBLicence: CC BY-NC-SA

https://www.merit.unu.edu/publications/wppdf/2022/wp2022-033.pdfLicence: CC BY-NC-SA

Cite this

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