Media Type

Article

Publication Date

1993

Description

I am delighted to be a discussant of the paper by Robert Barro and Jong-Wha Lee. A whole endogenous growth industry has taken shape in the past several years, and Barro's contribution to this industry is both impressive and valuable. I would regard this latest paper as a continuation of the quest for enhancing our understanding as to why some countries grow faster than others. As a policy economist working on Africa, an area that has both grown less rapidly than other developing regions and has a disproportionate share of slowgrowing countries, I am particularly attracted to the line of inquiry adopted in this paper. . I find myself in agreement with the general conclusions presented in the paper: that policy distortions, political instability, and the size of government affect growth negatively, and that human capital and physical investment have positive effects. I am less persuaded by the net convergence hypothesis, as the African countries have demonstrated a growing divergence and other studies tend to find evidence to the contrary. I would like to offer a few observations about the model specification and the measurement of variables and omitted variables, without questioning the merit of cross-country regressions for specific country or regional policy inferences. First, I wonder whether time-series variation within each country that captures country-specific effects in the cross-sectional studies might enrich the analysis and yield different

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