[발췌] Good Policy or Good Luck? Country's Growth Performance and Temporary Shocks

출처:  .... , NBER Working Paper, 1993
자료: http://www.nber.org/papers/w4474


※ 발췌 (excerpt):

Much of the new growth literature stresses country characteristics as the dominant determinant of growth performance. ( ... ) This paper presents a fact suggesting the emphasis on country characteristics is misguided: growth rates are highly unstable over time, while country characteristics are highly persistent. The correlation across decades of countries' growth rates of income per capita is around 0.1 to 0.3, while most country characteristics display cross-decade correlations of 0.6 to 0.9. Correlations of growth across periods as long as two decades─periods lengths comparable to those used in the cross-section empirical literature─are similarly low. With a few famous exceptions, the same countries do not do well period after period; countries are "success stories" one period and disappointments the next.

The low persistㄷnce of growth rates reconciles the enormous variation in growth rates across countries with remarkable stability of relative incomes across countries. For each of the last two decades the standard deviation of growth rates has been over 2.5, nearly the growth difference between Japan and the US. Yet the correlation of (Summers and Heston (1991)) GDP per capita in 1960 and 1988 was 0.92. Even more striking the rank correlation of GDP per capita for the 28 countries for which Maddison (1989) has data is 0.82 over 1870-1988. Major changes in country income rankings would have required large persistent differences in growth rates; in the event, income rankings did not change much and only a small fraction of the growth differences between countries were persistent.

This paper has three sections and a conclusion. The first section presents the basic facts about persistence of cross country growth differences and of country characteristics. The second section attempts to identify the temporary shocks important in explaining low persistence of growth rates across decades. The third section interprets low persistence under two types of growth models: models in which country characteristics determine long-run growth rates and models in which country characteristics determine relative levels of steady state income and long-run growth rates are determined by worldwide technological change. ( ... )

The persistence of growth rate differences across countries, even over long periods, is low. ( ... ) This low persistence result is robust over the choice of country sample, time period, and sectoral performance measure.

( ... ... )

The most straightforward explanation of the low persistence of growth rates would be that the country characteristics usually thought to be determine growth are themselves not persistent. This section shows this explanation to be untenable: country characteristics are persistent.