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Created 2/19/1997
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What Is the World Coming To? A Comment on Danny Quah's Studies of Economic Growth Across Nations

J. Bradford DeLong
University of California at Berkeley

I cannot comment on the paper by Durlauf and Quah for the Handbook of Macroeconomics. I cannot comment onthe paper by Durlauf and Quah because there is no paper by Durlauf and Quah. Instead I will comment on a paper by Danny Quah--"Empirics for Growth and Distribution: Stratification, Polarization, and Convergence Clubs" (Discussion paper #324 of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics).

So let me begin:

First, let me give three cheers for Danny Quah's long-term skepticism with respect to the usefulness of the standard cross-country growth regressions. I remember thinking that he was on to something when I saw the "conditional convergence" literature flare up. National economies were heading for their long-run steady state growth paths at 2% per year, we were told by Barro and Sala-i-Martin and by Mankiw, Romer, and Weil: the epsilons in the equations:

were shrinking at two percent per year or so.

Comments

Created 2/19/1997
Go to Brad DeLong's Home Page