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The fight against the coronavirus pandemic has led to an insulation of social and economic life and will have considerable economic consequences. Important areas of the industry and service sectors were partially or completely shutdown. A resumption of activity should happen as soon as possible, once the medical pre-conditions have been established and are met. This requires a clear exit strategy and following several steps to return to previous welfare and growth data levels. After securing survival during this crisis via various liquidity lines and bridging loans, the economy's restart requires the relaunch of public infrastructure, especially of schools and kindergartens. To facilitate a coordinated and synchronised restart of complex industrial value chains, we need clear signals on a planned schedule. A tax policy driven departure signal and a demand side focused growth programme could make an important contribution to a new economic dynamic after the crisis.

Cross-country labor productivity differences are larger in agriculture than in non-agriculture. We propose a new explanation for these patterns in which the self-selection of heterogeneous workers determines sector productivity. We formalize our theory in a generalequilibrium Roy model in which preferences feature a subsistence food requirement. In the model, subsistence requirements induce workers that are relatively unproductive at agricultural work to nonetheless select into the agriculture sector in poor countries. When parameterized, the model predicts that productivity differences are roughly twice as large in agriculture as non-agriculture even when countries differ by an economy-wide efficiency term that affects both sectors uniformly.

In 2018, Paul Romer and William Nordhaus shared the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Romer was recognized \"for integrating technological innovations into long-run macroeconomic analysis\". This article reviews his prize-winning contributions. Romer, together with others, rejuvenated the field of economic growth. He developed the theory of endogenous technological change, in which the search for new ideas by profit-maximizing entrepreneurs and researchers is at the heart of economic growth. Underlying this theory, he pinpointed that the nonrivalry of ideas is ultimately responsible for the rise in living standards over time.

The impacts of energy shortages characterized by regular blackouts, natural gas, and electricity load shedding in Pakistan affected each economic sector, causing an energy-induced crisis and ecological sustainability issues. This study was conducted to reveal the benefits of renewable energy and describe the economic losses associated with electricity unavailability using supply-driven input-output as a price model across 34 sectors. The results revealed that exogenous shocks in electricity prices are responsible for bringing significant fluctuations across the business cycle in the country. Similarly, the overall output of Pakistan's economy will decrease by 24.89 rupees due to a 1-kilowatt-hour reduction in electricity supply. Moreover, both forward and backward linkages of Pakistan's economy revealed that higher electricity allocation coefficients pose significant output impacts on most sectors. We conclude that indirect output impacts require due consideration to avoid the underestimation problem due to total electricity shortages. It is recommended that the government provide a social and legal framework to boost the environmental sustainability and economic activities in the textile, oil refining, production of cement, and fertilizer sectors for sustainable economic growth.

Productivity growth is important for long-term economic growth and development, and technology adoption is one of its key drivers. This study empirically assesses whether political regimes are a significant determinant of technology diffusion. Specifically, we examine the effects of political regimes on diffusion of technology using data based on a sample of 104 technologies from 137 countries for the period 1901 to 2000. We consider detailed categories of technologies and investigate the differences in the impacts of political regimes on each technology. Our estimation results show that democracy does not have a significant impact on the overall diffusion of technology but it is positively associated with the diffusion of health- and agriculture-related technologies. Furthermore, the diffusion of infrastructure, general, and other sector-specific technologies is not influenced by political regimes. Considering different types of democracies and dictatorships, we find that parliamentary democracy has a positive impact on health- and agriculture-related technology diffusion. On the contrary, all types of dictatorships, namely civilian, military, and royal, have negative impacts on diffusion of technology.

This study investigates the role of mobile money innovations in the incidence of income inequality on poverty and severity of poverty in 42 sub-Saharan African countries over the period 1980 to 2019. Mobile money innovations are understood as the mobile used to send money and the mobile used to pay bills online while income inequality is measured with the Gini index. Poverty is measured as the poverty headcount ratio while the severity of poverty is generated as the squared of the poverty gap index. The empirical evidence is based on interactive Quantile regressions. The following main findings are established. (i) Income inequality unconditionally reduces poverty and the severity of poverty though the significance is not throughout the conditional distributions of poverty and the severity of poverty. (ii) Mobile money innovations significantly moderate the positive incidence of income inequality on poverty and the severity of poverty in some quantiles. (iii) Positive net effects are apparent exclusively in the poverty regressions. (iv) Given the negative conditional effects, policy thresholds or minimum mobile money innovation levels needed to completely nullify the positive incidence of income inequality on poverty are provided: 27.666 (% age 15 +) and 24.000 (% age 15 +) of the mobile used to send money in the 50th and 75th quantiles, respectively and 16.272 (% age 15 +) and 13.666 (% age 15 +) of the mobile used to pay bills online in the 10th and 50th quantiles, respectively. Policy implications are discussed with respect of SDG1 on poverty reduction and SDG10 on inequality mitigation.

This paper examines the central hypothesis of the influential Malthusian theory, according to which improvements in the technological environment during the preindustrial era had generated only temporary gains in income per capita, eventually leading to a larger, but not significantly richer, population. Exploiting exogenous sources of cross-country variations in land productivity and the level of technological advancement, the analysis demonstrates that, in accordance with the theory, technological superiority and higher land productivity had significant positive effects on population density but insignificant effects on the standard of living, during the time period 1—1500 CE.

This paper examines the evolution of unemployment in a task-based model that allows for two types of technical change. One is automation, which turns labor tasks into mechanized ones. The second is addition of new labor tasks, which increases specialization, as in the expanding variety literature. The paper shows that in equilibrium the unemployment caused by automation converges to zero over time.

The Lewis model has remained, for more than half a century, one of the dominant theories of development economics. This paper argues that the power of the model lies in the simplicity of its central insight: that poor countries contain enclaves of economic activity just as rich countries contain enclaves of poverty; and that a proximate explanation for the difference in income per capita across countries is that there are large differences in the relative sizes of their “modern” and “traditional” sectors. But while the Lewis model contains a powerful and compelling macro narrative, its details have proved somewhat elusive to scholars and students who have followed, and its policy implications are unclear. This paper identifies several key insights of the Lewis model, discusses several different interpretations of the model, and then reviews modern evidence for the central propositions of the model. In closing, we consider the relevance of Lewis for current thinking about development strategies and policies.

Intergenerational income mobility is often studied in the context of inequality, but it also plays a critical role in long-term economic development. This study introduces an endogenous growth model to explore how intergenerational income mobility affects macroeconomic growth. In the model, individuals earn wages based on their education and skills, with the accumulation of human capital influenced by inherited abilities, as well as public and private educational investments. A key finding is that economies that allocate more resources to primary and secondary education achieve higher levels of both absolute and relative income mobility, signaling a better alignment of individuals with suitable occupations. This increased mobility, in turn, drives greater economic growth and higher educational attainment. The results highlight intergenerational mobility as a crucial factor for economic growth, providing valuable insights for public policy design. This study makes a significant contribution to understanding the macroeconomic consequences of intergenerational income mobility, particularly in the context of public education investment. By developing an endogenous growth model that integrates multiple regional economies, this study demonstrates that higher spending on K-12 education enhances both absolute and relative intergenerational income mobility. This increased mobility leads to more efficient talent allocation, higher college attainment rates, and ultimately, faster economic growth. The model's predictions are empirically validated using U.S. commuting zone data, reinforcing the relevance of its findings. The study also highlights the redistributive benefits of centralized education finance policies in reducing regional inequality and promoting long-term economic performance. These insights provide strong theoretical and empirical foundations for policy interventions aimed at improving opportunity equality through public education investment.