Why Do Some Countries Produce So Much More Output per Worker than Others?

Robert E. Hall and Charles I. Jones ()

No 6564, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Output per worker varies enormously across countries. Why? On an accounting basis, our analysis shows that differences in physical capital and educational attainment can only partially explain the variation in output per worker we find a large amount of variation in the level of the Solow residual across countries. At a deeper level, we document that the differences in capital accumulation, productivity, and therefore output per worker are driven by differences in institutions and government policies, which we call social infrastructure. We treat social infrastructure as endogenous, determined historically by location and other factors captured in part by language.

JEL-codes: E23 O47 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999-06
Note: EFG
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w6564.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

Related works:
Journal Article: Why Do Some Countries Produce So Much More Output Per Worker Than Others? (1999)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:6564

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w6564
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Address: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().