The Great Growth Debate: A Statistical Look at Mankiw, Romer, and Weil, versus Islam

Jeffrey Edwards

Atlantic Economic Journal, 2005, vol. 33, issue 1, 92 pages

Abstract: This paper takes a purely statistical look at two of the most important empirical growth papers authored by Mankiw et al. [1992] and Islam [1995]. MRW claim that the Solow model is justified only when human capital is added to the regression, while Islam claims that cross-country heterogeneity is the actual culprit. In a statistical sense, the author of this study finds that Islam was correct in the fact that mean heterogeneity does exist in MRW’s data. However, after statistical adequacy is achieved, human capital continues to maintain its role as a significant determinant of growth even though the estimates are not robust for one of the two cross-country samples investigated. On the other hand, though Islam’s models were not without statistical problems, they continue to maintain their traditional form and his estimates are robust to respecification. This paper also exemplifies the need for objective statistical testing methods in applied work. Copyright IAES 2005

Keywords: C1; C5; E0; N0; O0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11293-005-1646-z (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:atlecj:v:33:y:2005:i:1:p:71-92

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/11293/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11293-005-1646-z

Access Statistics for this article

Atlantic Economic Journal is currently edited by Kathleen S. Virgo

More articles in Atlantic Economic Journal from Springer, International Atlantic Economic Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().