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This paper proposes a model of endogenous economic growth and distribution explicitly incorporating social extraction and political competition, with an application to the Philippine historical experience. The major objective is to explain developments in the distribution of national income and wealth and in the growth rate of per capita capacity output. When calibrated, the proposed model is found to be consistent with the broad contours of Philippine macroeconomic history.

This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical aspects of the relationship between macroeconomic policies and the long-run rate of growth of GNP. The macroeconomic policies examined include fiscal policies, monetary and interest rate policies, external policies, and policies to reform the goods and labor markets, including adjustments of producer prices and wages. In general, the effects of these policies on growth operate directly or indirectly through their influence on investment in physical and human capital, and on factor productivity. The available empirical evidence confirms the effects of specific macroeconomic and financial policies on long-run growth.

A robust empirical determinant of long-term economic growth in many developing countries has been the expansion and diversification of the export sector. The latter, in turn, has been influenced by capital accumulation and economic growth. The growth model developed here explores this interdependence in the context of the “new growth theory”. The analytical results are consistent with empirical regularities observed in the exports-economic growth linkages. The paper also derives a formula for the optimal rate of return to capital in the presence of learning effects and improvement of human resources brought about by export expansion and its interaction with saving and investment.

This volume is a collection of published and unpublished papers that the author has written over the last two decades during part of his tenure at the International Monetary Fund, The South East Asian Central Banks Research and Training Center, and Singapore Management University. The policy-oriented book examines the links between macroeconomic policies and noninflationary, full-employment levels and growth rates of aggregate gross domestic product, with particular focus on the application in emerging markets of the tools of growth theory. Theoretically sound and grounded in practical wisdom, this book is an essential reading for economic, financial and developmental policymakers, professional economists, and undergraduate/graduate students in economics and social sciences.

This paper analyzes the effects of several policy and other macro-economic variables on the ratio of private investment to GDP in developing countries. Using data for a sample of 23 developing countries over the period 1975-87, the econometric evidence indicates that the rate of private investment is positively related to the real growth rate of GDP, public sector investment, and to a lesser extent the level of per capita GDP, while it is negatively related to domestic inflation, the debt service ratio, the debt-to-GDP ratio, and high real interest rates. There is also some indication that all but the last of these variables had a greater impact before the onset of the debt crisis in 1982, while the debt-to-GDP ratio (a measure of a country’s debt overhang) has become more important since then.

This paper identifies macroeconomic stability, effective bank supervision, and an appropriate sequencing of stabilization, banking regulations, and interest rate policies as common characteristics of the relatively successful experiments in financial sector liberalization. Recent theoretical developments help to explain why interest rates in free markets for bank credit may fall short of market-clearing levels, or may rise to risky levels with adverse consequences for financial institutions and the economy at large. To prevent such outcomes, macro-economic stabilization and improved bank supervision should generally precede complete removal of control on bank interest rates.

The model developed here postulates that learning through experience plays a critical role in raising labor productivity over time, with three major consequences. First, the steady-state growth rate (of output) becomes endogenous and is influenced by government policies. Second, the speed of adjustment to steady-state growth is faster, and enhanced learning further reduces adjustment time. Third, both steady-state growth and the optimal net rate of return to capital are higher than the sum of exogenous rates of technical change and population growth. Simulation results confirm the model’s faster speed of adjustment, while regression analysis explains a large part of divergent growth patterns across countries in terms of the extent of openness and human development and of the quality of fiscal policies.

Several recent empirical studies have examined determinants of economic growth using country average (cross-section) data. In contrast, this paper employs a technique for using a panel of both cross-section and time-series data for 98 industrial and developing countries over 1960-85 to determine the quantitative importance for economic growth of both country-specific and time-varying factors such as human capital, public investment, and outward-oriented trade policies. The empirical results provide support for the view that these factors exert a positive and significant influence on economic growth. They also provide estimates of the speed at which the gap in real per capita income between rich and poor countries is likely to be reduced over the longer term.

Although conventional wisdom suggests that reducing military spending may improve a country’s economic growth performance, empirical studies have produced ambiguous results. This paper extends a standard growth model and estimates it using techniques that exploit both cross-section and time-series dimensions of available data to obtain consistent estimates of the growth-retarding effects of military spending via its adverse impact on capital formation and resource allocation. Model simulations suggest that a substantial long-run “Peace Dividend”--in the form of higher capacity output--may result from: (i) markedly lower military expenditure levels achieved in most regions during the late 1980s; and (ii) further military spending cuts that would be possible in the future if a global peace could be secured.