A Contribution to the Empirics of Economic Growth

This paper examines whether the Solow growth model is consistent with the international variation in the standard of living. It shows that an augmented Solow model that includes accumulation of human as well as physical capital provides an excellent description of the cross-country data. The model explains about 80 percent of the international variation in income per capita, and the estimated influences of physical-capital accumulation, human-capital accumulation, and population growth confirm the model's predictions. The paper also examines the implications of the Solow model for convergence in standards of living -- that is, for whether poor countries tend to grow faster than rich countries. The evidence indicates that, holding population growth and capital accumulation constant, countries converge at about the rate the augmented Solow model predicts.