Information Spillover and Economic Development

Nien-Huei Jiang ()
Additional contact information
Nien-Huei Jiang: Department of Economics, Vanderbilt University

No 30, Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Working Papers from Vanderbilt University Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper explores a new aspect of the relationship between backwardness and growth, "information spillover". If solving problems is a source of economic growth, then knowing which problems have been solved is per se valuable. A backward country will concentrate its problem-solving efforts on those problems that have been solved abroad. For countries with an intermediate level of human capital, this effect could be strong enough for them to grow faster than more advanced countries in the short run. However, for countries with low human capital, the same information is not as valuable and they will grow slowly or will even stay stagnant. Since it is not the absolute, but the relative human capital levels (of information receiver and provider) that determine growth rates, this model predicts a great variety of economic performance among backward countries.

Keywords: Information spillover; problem-solving; growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O00 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000-07
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.accessecon.com/pubs/VUECON/vu00-w30.pdf First version, 2000 (application/pdf)

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:van:wpaper:0030

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Working Papers from Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by John P. Conley ().