Must-Read: Charles I. Jones and Paul M. Romer: The New Kaldor Economic Growth Facts: Ideas, Institutions, Population, and Human Capital

Must-Read: Charles I. Jones and Paul M. Romer: The New Kaldor Economic Growth Facts: Ideas, Institutions, Population, and Human Capital: “Here is a summary of our new list of stylized facts, to be discussed in more detail:

1. Increases in the extent of the market. Increased flows of goods, ideas, finance, and people—via globalization, as well as urbanization—have increased the extent of the market for all workers and consumers.
2. Accelerating growth. For thousands of years, growth in both population and per capita GDP has accelerated, rising from virtually zero to the relatively rapid rates observed in the last century.
3. Variation in modern growth rates. The variation in the rate of growth of per capita GDP increases with the distance from the technology frontier.
4. Large income and total factor productivity (TFP) differences. Differences in measured inputs explain less than half of the enormous cross-country differ- ences in per capita GDP.
5. Increases in human capital per worker. Human capital per worker is rising dramatically throughout the world.
6. Long-run stability of relative wages. The rising quantity of human capital, relative to unskilled labor, has not been matched by a sustained decline in its relative price.