If Technology Has Arrived Everywhere, Why Has Income Diverged?

By Diego A. Comin, M. Mestieri. American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 2013

235 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the cross-country evolution of technology diffusion over the last two centuries. We document that adoption lags between poor and rich countries have converged, while the intensity of use of adopted technologies of poor countries relative to rich countries has diverged. The evolution of aggregate productivity implied by these trends in technology diffusion resembles the actual evolution of the world income distribution in the last two centuries. Cross-country differences in adoption lags account for a significant part of the cross-country income divergence in the nineteenth century. The divergence in intensity of use accounts for the divergence during the twentieth century. (JEL N10, N70, O14, O33, O41, O47)

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ac2712b0385232a38eb12c5855789c3e4d05e85c

Citations in the corpus

• What Remains of Cross-Country Convergence? (2018, unknown): “See also Comin and Mestieri (2018).”
• Culture, Institutions, and the Wealth of Nations (2017, unknown): “These estimates do not prove that people from individualist cultures are more successful at innovation than people from collectivist cultures, but they clearly suggest that culture is at work in the choice of such occupations.”
• An institution-based view of global IPR history (2017, unknown): “Yet as an economy develops further, additional inventive capacity, wider diffusion of innovations, and demands for high-quality products emerge (Comin & Ferrer, 2013; Yip & McKern, 2016).”