The immense economic inequality we observe in the world today is the path-dependent outcome of a multitude of historical processes, one of the most important of which has been European colonialism. This column, taken from a recent Vox eBook, discusses how colonialism has shaped modern inequality in several fundamental, but heterogeneous, ways.
Development
Over the past decades, economists working on growth have ‘rediscovered’ the importance of history, leading to the emergence of a vibrant, far-reaching inter-disciplinary stream of work. This column introduces a new eBook in three volumes which examines key themes in this emergent literature and discusses the impact they have on our understanding of the long-run influence of historical events on current economics.
Economists are just starting to understand how observed input-output linkages and productivity differences are connected. This column investigates how differences in the distribution of sectoral input-output multipliers interact with sectoral productivities to determine cross-country differences in aggregate income. It finds that the impact of the linkages on productivity are substantial, which in turn has significant implications for policy.
Policy advice for countries managing oil and gas windfalls is typically to smooth consumption boosts by borrowing on international capital markets pre-windfall, repaying the debt and accumulating assets in a sovereign wealth fund during the windfall, and withdrawing from that fund when the windfall ends. This column outlines various reasons why this approach can be disastrous for developing countries, and also considers the best response to a commodity price crash.
A new set of historical national accounts for Spain constructs estimates of output and expenditure from 1850 onwards, which means we can estimate the evolution of GDP per capita and labour productivity during this period. This column argues that the data demonstrates that GDP per capita captures long-run trends in welfare in Spain, but not short and medium run trends.
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Vox eBooks
Michalopoulos, Papaioannou, 23 January 2017
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Events
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19 - 22 April 2017 / Budapest, Hungary / Central European University
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29 - 30 June 2017 / Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, 4200-464 Porto PORTUGAL / School of Economics and Management, University of Porto (FEP)
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31 March - 1 April 2017 / German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) and Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany / Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW)
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15 - 16 June 2017 / London / EBRD and Bank of England
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2 - 3 March 2017 / Brussels / Vrije Universiteit Brussel, INFER
