The World Distribution of Productivity: Country TFP Choice in a Nelson-Phelps Economy

Erika Färnstrand Damsgaard

No 176, 2008 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: This paper builds a theory of the shape of the distribution of total-factor productivity (TFP) across countries. The distribution of productivity across countries is arguably twin-peaked in the data, and the proposed theory presents conditions under which twin-peakedness is an equilibrium outcome. We construct a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium model where world growth is endogenous and driven by investments in TFP. All countries invest in TFP in order to increase their productivity, and each country internalizes the dynamic effects of its own TFP accumulation, i.e., through its own investment. In addition, there are technology spillovers across countries, modeled according to the Nelson-Phelps specification. We find that even under the assumption that all countries have identical technologies for TFP accumulation, the world distribution of TFP across countries can be asymmetric; it is twin-peaked, or bimodal. More specifically, twin-peaked world distributions of TFP arise if the catch-up term in the Nelson-Phelps equation is sufficiently weak. If, on the other hand, technological catch-up is important, the world distribution of TFP is unimodal.

Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2008/paper_176.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The World Distribution of Productivity: Country TFP Choice in a Nelson-Phelps Economy (2010)
Working Paper: The World Distribution of Productivity: Country TFP Choice in a Nelson-Phelps Economy (2010)
Working Paper: The World Distribution of Productivity: Country TFP Choice in a Nelson-Phelps Economy (2010)
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:red:sed008:176

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2008 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().