Building blocks for barriers to riches

Narayana Kocherlakota

No 288, Staff Report from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

Abstract: Total factor productivity (TFP) differs greatly across countries. In this paper, I provide a novel rationalization for these differences. I consider two environments, one in which enforcement is full and the other in which enforcement is limited. In both settings, manufactured goods can be produced using a high-TFP technology or a low-TFP technology; there is a fixed cost associated with adoption of the former. I suppose that the fixed cost is sufficiently small that adoption takes place in a symmetric Pareto optimum in the limited-enforcement setting. Under this condition, I prove two results. First, adoption takes place in all Pareto optima in the full-enforcement setting. Second, adoption may not take place in a Pareto optimum in the limited-enforcement setting, if the division of social surplus is sufficiently unequal. I conclude that limited enforcement and high inequality interact to create particularly strong barriers to riches (in the language of Parente and Prescott (1999, 2000).

Keywords: Technology - Economic aspects; Productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2001
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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