This engaging book contains a set of original contributions to the much-debated issues of long-run economic growth in relation to institutional and social progress. It explores the mutual relationships between living standards, social habits, education an

The COVID-19 pandemic struck the global economy after a decade that featured a broad-based slowdown in productivity growth. Global Productivity: Trends, Drivers, and Policies presents the first comprehensive analysis of the evolution and drivers of productivity growth, examines the effects of COVID-19 on productivity, and discusses a wide range of policies needed to rekindle productivity growth. The book also provides a far-reaching data set of multiple measures of productivity for up to 164 advanced economies and emerging market and developing economies, and it introduces a new sectoral database of productivity. The World Bank has created an extraordinary book on productivity, covering a large group of countries and using a wide variety of data sources. There is an emphasis on emerging and developing economies, whereas the prior literature has concentrated on developed economies. The book seeks to understand growth patterns and quantify the role of (among other things) the reallocation of factors, technological change, and the impact of natural disasters, including the COVID-19 pandemic. This book is must-reading for specialists in emerging economies but also provides deep insights for anyone interested in economic growth and productivity. Martin Neil Baily Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution Former Chair, U.S. President’s Council of Economic Advisers This is an important book at a critical time. As the book notes, global productivity growth had already been slowing prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and collapses with the pandemic. If we want an effective recovery, we have to understand what was driving these long-run trends. The book presents a novel global approach to examining the levels, growth rates, and drivers of productivity growth. For anyone wanting to understand or influence productivity growth, this is an essential read. Nicholas Bloom William D. Eberle Professor of Economics, Stanford University The COVID-19 pandemic hit a global economy that was already struggling with an adverse pre-existing condition—slow productivity growth. This extraordinarily valuable and timely book brings considerable new evidence that shows the broad-based, long-standing nature of the slowdown. It is comprehensive, with an exceptional focus on emerging market and developing economies. Importantly, it shows how severe disasters (of which COVID-19 is just the latest) typically harm productivity. There are no silver bullets, but the book suggests sensible strategies to improve growth prospects. John Fernald Schroders Chaired Professor of European Competitiveness and Reform and Professor of Economics, INSEAD

This book presents a multi-disciplinary, insightful approach to development and its economic implications.This book pursues the search for the ultimate causes of economic growth through a wide-ranging review of historical, demographic, cultural, institutional, political and international causes of stagnation and growth. It pays extensive attention to non-economic developments such as health trends, educational development and state formation. It has a strong empirical and comparative organization, and extensive statistical information. The emphasis is on long-run trends in living standards, poverty and growth since World War II, but coverage includes development as far back as 1500. Students and anyone else interested in understanding development and economic issues throughout the world.

“A superb new understanding of the dynamic economy as a learning society, one that goes well beyond the usual treatment of education, training, and R&D.”—Robert Kuttner, author of The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy Since its publication Creating a Learning Society has served as an effective tool for those who advocate government policies to advance science and technology. It shows persuasively how enormous increases in our standard of living have been the result of learning how to learn, and it explains how advanced and developing countries alike can model a new learning economy on this example. Creating a Learning Society: Reader’s Edition uses accessible language to focus on the work’s central message and policy prescriptions. As the book makes clear, creating a learning society requires good governmental policy in trade, industry, intellectual property, and other important areas. The text’s central thesis—that every policy affects learning—is critical for governments unaware of the innovative ways they can propel their economies forward. “Profound and dazzling. In their new book, Joseph E. Stiglitz and Bruce C. Greenwald study the human wish to learn and our ability to learn and so uncover the processes that relate the institutions we devise and the accompanying processes that drive the production, dissemination, and use of knowledge . . . This is social science at its best.”—Partha Dasgupta, University of Cambridge “An impressive tour de force, from the theory of the firm all the way to long-term development, guided by the focus on knowledge and learning . . . This is an ambitious book with far-reaching policy implications.”—Giovanni Dosi, director, Institute of Economics, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna “[A] sweeping work of macroeconomic theory.”—Harvard Business Review

The purpose of this contributed volume is to consider how global consumption patterns will develop in the next few decades, and what the consequences of that development will be for the economy, policymakers, and society at large. In the long run, the extent to which economic growth translates into better living conditions strongly depends on how rising affluence and new technologies shape consumer preferences. The ongoing rise in household income in developing countries raises some important questions: Will consumption patterns always continue to expand in the same manner as we have witnessed in the previous two centuries? If not, how might things evolve differently? And what implications would such changes hold for not only our understanding of consumption behavior but also our pursuit of more sustainable societies?

In this book, Davide Gualerzi employs the concept of transformational growth to explore the investment-driven cycle of expansion of the 1990s in the US economy, and of the of role played by the ICT sector. The book articulates a view of demand-led growth in which the focus is on effective demand, the composition of the growth process and the link between changing composition and expansion.

The contributors to this edited collection argue that a flexible Job Guarantee program able to react to an economy’s fluctuating need for work would stabilize the labor standard, the value of employment in relation to money. During economic downturns, the program would expand to provide more public sector jobs in response to private sector layoffs. It would then contract when economic growth offered private sector employment opportunities. This flexible full employment program would create a balanced, perpetually active labor force, providing the macroeconomic stability necessary to define a functioning labor standard. Just as the gold standard measured the worth of money against gold reserves, John Maynard Keynes argued, so a labor standard ought to measure the value of money in terms of its labor equivalent. However, he failed to account for the fact that, unlike a gold standard, a labor standard does not have any kind of surety that money will continue to match its value in paid work over time. Together, the contributors argue that full employment would provide this missing security and allow authorities to define the value equivalencies of money and labor, the way that money once represented its exact equivalent in gold.