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The article comments on a paper published within the issue, "Capital Formation and the Recent Productivity Slowdown," by Peter Clark. The author also discusses results from his own research in "Accounting for United States Economic Growth, 1929-1969," and applies it to Clark's paper. It is suggested that an abrupt rise in energy prices may have affected growth rates during the mid-1970s. The author also looks at a similar analysis made by John Kendrick, who focuses on the U.S. postwar period of 1948-1966.

This paper examines the underlying structural elements of US growth patterns, pre- and post-crisis. Prior to the recession, the US economy exhibited a defective growth pattern driven by outsized domestic demand. As domestic aggregate demand retreats to more sustainable levels relative to total income, the tradable side of the economy is a catalyst for restoring strong growth. A structural rebalancing is already underway; although it is only a third of the economy, the tradable sector generated more than half of gross gains in value-added since the start of the recovery. However, distributional issues loom on the horizon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the potential role that airfreight transport in the US can play in stimulating local and regional economic development. The analysis examines trends in employment and income for metropolitan statistical areas that make use of airfreight services. The focus is on causality, and not on simple correlation, and uses econometric analysis rather than simpler economic multiplier approaches. Granger causality testing based on panel data covering 35 airport and 32 metropolitan statistical areas in the US from 1990 to 2009 indicates that airfreight transport was a positive driver for local economic development. The conclusions focus on the strengths but also the weaknesses of the methodology for assessing causality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents a paper on economic-demographic interactions and long swings in economic growth. The paper building on the work of numerous predecessors, suggests that one of the mechanisms responsible for long swings in economic growth may involve interactions among aggregate demand, labor-market conditions, and household growth, with a feedback effect from the last to the first. An upswing in the growth of aggregate demand and the growing labor-market tightness induced thereby engenders accelerated marriage, migration, and household growth. These are critical decision points in the life cycle, entailing spending commitments extending over several years as a new home is established and a family started or settled. In effect, such commitments are geared to a notion of permanent income and thus tend to be relatively insensitive to short term income changes. A bunching of such commitments serves to cushion the economy against the usual business cycle and becomes exhausted only gradually. Such a bunching of long term spending commitments may be the key to Kuznets cycle phenomena.

The widespread tendency in empirical studies of economic behavior to discard war years as "abnormal," while doubtless often justified, is, on the whole, unfortunate. The major defect of the data on which economists must rely on is that the data generated by experience rather than deliberately contrived experiment, encompasses a small range of variation. Experience in general proceeds smoothly and continuously. In consequence, it is difficult to disentangle systematic effects from random variation since both are of much the same order of magnitude. From this point of view, data for wartime periods are peculiarly valuable. At such times, violent changes in major economic magnitudes occur over relatively brief periods, thereby providing precisely the kind of evidence that we would like get by "critical" experiments if we could conduct them. Of course, the source of changes means that effects in which we are interested are necessarily intertwined with others that we would eliminate from a contrived experiment. But this difficulty applies to all our data, not to data for wartime periods alone. To the student of monetary phenomena, the three wartime episodes with which this paper deals the experience of the United States in the Civil War, first World War and second World War offer an especially close approximation to the kind of critical experiment he would like to conduct. As we shall see, in all three cases the rise in prices was of almost precisely the same magnitude, so this critical variable is under control. Yet other crucial features varied, offering the opportunity to test alternative hypotheses designed to explain price changes. Besides their significance for the general understanding of monetary phenomena, the wartime experiences are unfortunately of interest in their own right.

This paper uses recent data on both broadband availability and adoption to empirically gauge the contribution of broadband to the economic growth of rural areas of the United States over the past decade. Availability data from the National Broadband Map aggregated to county level is used in conjunction with county-level adoption data from Federal Communication Commission. Economic variables of interest include median household income, number of firms with paid employees, total employed, percentage in poverty, and the percentage of employees classified as either creative class or non-farm proprietors. A propensity score matching technique (between a “treated” group associated with various broadband thresholds and a control group) is used to make preliminary causal statements regarding broadband and economic health. Growth rates between 2001 and 2010 for different economic measures are tested for statistical differences between the treated and non-treated groups, restricting the analysis to non-metropolitan counties. Results suggest that high levels of broadband adoption in rural areas positively (and potentially causally) impacted income growth between 2001 and 2010, and negatively influenced unemployment growth. Similarly, low levels of broadband adoption in rural areas lead to declines in the number of firms and total employment numbers in the county. Broadband availability measures (as opposed to adoption) demonstrate only limited impacts, suggesting that future broadband policies should be more demand-oriented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberal theory rationalizes inequality as both 1) necessary for growth and 2) offset by a trickle down to lower income groups. However, benefits from income growth failed to reach most of the population for the last several decades in the United States. Instead, a negative trickle down has lowered many people's wellbeing. The first aspect of negative trickle down is a new form of Veblen's conspicuous consumption with positional goods. The second is the effect on the provision of public goods. The third is the competition for limited resources, such as housing. We review how greater income inequality contributes to each. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper introduces a series of articles about economics and international trade. The gap in income and wealth between the rich and the poor countries is ever widening. Ha-Joon Chang is a trade economist and historian who strongly contends that at the heart of trade theory lies a flaw when it comes to developing countries. Infant industries often need protecting, he argues. In fact, every rich economy today protected its infant industries on its way to development in the 1800s and through much of the early 1900s. Thomas Palley, a Washington economist who works for George Soros's Open Society Institute, also maintains that world trade is at a turning point. He also believes that poor countries must become more willing to accept labor and environmental standards. He believes it is up to Democrats in Washington to take the lead on the issue. Michael Perelman in his article traces several historical cases to show how tight patent laws have harmed technological progress in the U.S. The issue also features an interview with a French doctoral student, Gilles Raveaud, by an American economist, Richard McIntyre, about an eruption in the French academic establishment that is being taken very seriously in France.

Drawing on the author's work, this lecture presents evidence on U.S. income and wealth inequality. It presents series for top income and wealth shares, and the distribution of economic growth by income groups. It discusses the mechanisms behind the evolution of U.S. income and wealth inequality from historical and comparative perspectives. It analyzes the role of public policy and in particular taxation in the evolution of inequality. ( JEL D31, F66, J24) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

State fiscal policy frequently focuses on stimulating a healthy business environment with the assumption that this is linked with long-term economic growth. The conventional wisdom is that a state’s tax rates are negatively correlated with economic development, prompting states to decrease business-targeted taxes to stimulate the economy. Surprisingly, however, very few studies have documented the long-term effects of these tax policies on different facets of the state economy and overall business atmosphere. In short, we do not know how the level of business taxation actually affects the economies of states. Using panel data for all 50 U.S. states from 1977 to 2005, this article examines the impact of state business taxes on the overall economic position of the state, specifically looking at their effect on economic development and business growth. With an elaborate set of controls, the article finds that state business tax cuts have little to no positive impact on gross state product, job creation, personal income, poverty rates, and business establishments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Building social tables in the tradition of Gregory King, we develop new estimates suggesting that between 1774 and 1800 American incomes fell in real per capita terms. The colonial South was richer than the North at the start, but was already beginning to lose its income lead by 1800. We also find that free American colonists had much more equal incomes than did households in England and Wales. The colonists had greater purchasing power than their English counterparts over all of the income ranks except in the top percent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We analyse the relationship between functional income distribution and economic growth in Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and the USA from 1960 until 2005. The analysis is based on a demand-driven distribution and growth model for an open economy inspired by Bhaduri and Marglin, which allows for either profit- or wage-led growth. We find that growth in France, Germany, the UK and the USA has been wage-led, whereas Austria and the Netherlands have been profit-led. In the case of Austria a domestically wage-led economy changes to profit-led when including the effect of distribution on external trade. The Netherlands, however, are already profit-led without external trade. Our results so far only partially confirm Bhaduri and Marglin's theoretical conclusion that wage-led growth becomes less feasible when the effects of distribution on foreign trade are taken into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the relations between economic growth and economic progress. The author states that economic growth and progress have not moved in tandem in the U.S. He suggests that social democracy and a guaranteed income policy are possible means to achieve a rough equality between growth and progress. However, he does not argue that a high level of gross domestic product (GDP) is a social evil. A large GDP per capita means that a society has moved out of subsistence farming, a prerequisite for complex, urban societies. Moreover, he asserts that economic growth does not automatically translate into a rising degree of security in the consumption of fundamental needs for the least advantaged.

The article discusses the concepts of neoliberal ideology in the U.S. Neoliberalism has claimed that there is only one way through development. In addition, the ideology outlooks that a general model of economic and political dynamic that allows them to asses the ultimate consequences of all partial steps. Moreover, the theory that emerges from neoclassical economics argued that competitive equilibrium is efficient but will also leads to stagnation of income in the absence of exogenous population growth and exogenous technical change. The theory has predicted that the levels of economic development should converge among countries.

One of the major problems confronting mankind today concerns the fact that roughly two thirds of the world's population lives in countries that are characterized by extremely low levels of economic and social well-being. In contrast to an annual per capita income of $1,864 in the United States, recent estimates indicate that about 70 per cent of the countries in the world have annual per capita incomes of less than $400. The economic development of any given country is a process which entails changes in nearly every aspect of economic and social life. The article makes an effort to compare the annual rates of increase in population and per capita income for selected underdeveloped countries during the period 1952 to 1958. For those countries which have been growing at a rate of less than 1 per cent per year, the annual rate of increase in per capita income has ranged from 3.1 per cent to 7.5 per cent, with an overall average of 5.9 per cent a year. In contrast, the average annual rate of per capita income increase has been only 2.4 per cent for countries whose annual rate of population growth has been between 1 and 2 per cent, and only 1.7 per cent for those countries which have been growing at a rate in excess of 2 per-cent per year.