Introduccion Teoria Crecimiento

Why Do Some Countries Produce So Much More Output per Worker than Others?
Robert E. Hall Hoover Institution and Department of Economics Stanford University National Bureau of Economic Research Hall@Hoover.Stanford.edu and Charles I. Jones Department of Economics Stanford University National Bureau of Economic Research Chad.Jones@Stanford.edu March 11, 1998 – Version 4.0
Abstract Output perworker varies enormously across countries. Why? On an accounting basis, our analysis shows that differences in physical capital and educational attainment can only partially explain the variation in output per worker — we find a large amount of variation in the level of the Solow residual across countries. At a deeper level, we document that the differences in capital accumulation, productivity, andtherefore output per worker are driven by differences in institutions and government policies, which we call social infrastructure. We treat social infrastructure as endogenous, determined historically by location and other factors captured in part by language. JEL Classification: E23, O47
A previous version of this paper was circulated under the title “The Productivity of Nations.” This research wassupported by the Center for Economic Policy Research at Stanford and by the National Science Foundation under grants SBR-9410039 (Hall) and SBR-9510916 (Jones) and is part of the NBER’s program on Economic Fluctuations and Growth. We thank Bobby Sinclair for excellent research assistance and colleagues too numerous to list for an outpouring of helpful commentary. Data used in the paper areavailable online from http://www.stanford.edu/~chadj.

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Introduction

In 1988, output per worker in the United States was more than 35 times higher than output per worker in Niger. In just over ten days, the average worker in the United States produced as much as an average worker in Niger produced in an entire year. Explaining such vast differences ineconomic performance is one of the fundamental challenges of economics. Analysis based on an aggregate production function provides some insight into these differences, an approach taken by Mankiw, Romer and Weil (1992) and Dougherty and Jorgenson (1996), among others. Differences among countries can be attributed to differences in human capital, physical capital, and productivity. Building on theiranalysis, our results suggest that differences in each element of the production function are important. In particular, however, our results emphasize the key role played by productivity. For example, consider the 35-fold difference in output per worker between the United States and Niger. Different capital intensities in the two countries contributed a factor of 1.5 to the income differences, whiledifferent levels of educational attainment contributed a factor of 3.1. The remaining difference — a factor of 7.7 — remains as the productivity residual. The breakdown suggested by the aggregate production function is just the first step in understanding differences in output per worker. Findings in the production function framework raise deeper questions such as: Why do some countries invest more thanothers in physical and human capital? And why are some countries so much more productive than others? These are the questions that this paper tackles. When aggregated through the production function, the answers to these questions add up to explain the differences in output per worker across countries. Our hypothesis is that differences in capital accumulation, productivity, and therefore output perworker are fundamentally related to differences in social infrastructure across countries. By social infrastructure, we mean

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the institutions and government policies that determine the economic environment within which individuals accumulate skills, and firms accumulate capital and produce output. A social infrastructure favorable to high levels of...