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The comprehension of the textbook and augmented Solow growth model has been studied to picture the consequences of workforce growth and capital. In the age of digitalization, Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is also the first necessity identified factors affecting labor productivity. This paper revisits the augmented Solow growth equation by integrating ICT as an explanator that improves labor productivity in Southeast Asian emerging economies. We used a Two‐Way Random‐Effects Model to regress the impact of workforce growth rate, physical capital, and human capital on labor productivity. The results show that using human capital is essential to improve output in emerging market countries rather than only using physical capital. According to our adjusted ICT factors, our analysis reveals that using the Internet and mobile cellular significantly boosts labor productivity. Moreover, the analysis of total factor productivity shows that most Southeast Asian economies highly depend on implementing ICT, especially the contribution of Internet usage and mobile cellular. Therefore, this study contributes to further studies and policy recommendations in improving the introduction of Internet usage and installation, especially for the emerging Southeast Asian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing studies identify two major underlying mechanisms behind East and Southeast Asia’s miraculous economic performance in the past 5 decades: accumulation and technological catching-up. This study investigates empirically the relative importance of these two mechanisms in Asian development based on a unified framework. Using canonical cross-economy panel data, the study arrives at three important findings. First, while the process of catching-up through capital accumulation played an important role worldwide, this mechanism was more salient in Asia than in other economies around the globe, especially during the region’s early phase of growth and development. Second, human capital formation had a significant positive effect on the technological catching-up process worldwide. In particular, human capital formation promoted technology adoption more strongly in Asia than in the rest of the world. Third, innovation has also been critical in facilitating recent growth in Asian economies. These results suggest that Asia’s capital-accumulation-driven growth in the early phase induced human capital formation and international technological transfers at later phases, with strong complementarities between these two types of capital. Asian economies likely went through three phases of catching-up, that is, capital accumulation, technological imitation, and then innovation. The experiences of these Asian economies in the last several decades provide critical lessons for latecomer growth and development.

In this article, we study the impact of health and education on the growth rate of total factor productivity (TFP) in a sample of 97 countries for the period 1960 to 2005. We find that both health and education have a positive and significant effect on GRTFP. The result that health has a positive effect on GRTFP is new to the literature. The result suggests that in designing policies which facilitate technology diffusion we need to broaden the concept of human capital to include health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We expand on the sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)–Rest of World (ROW) growth difference literature and find a robust and consistently negative coefficient of an SSA dummy variable over the period 1965 to 2000. Most importantly, we find that SSA countries converge more slowly, if at all, than ROW countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]