The paper estimates a simple growth model with time-varying cross-country fixed effects on a panel of high-income countries and decomposes changes in potential growth into convergence, movements in the steady state determinants, global TFP growth and labor force growth in order to investigate the sources of potential growth slowdown in CEE following the global financial crisis. Convergence is found to explain about 40% of the slowdown, the other main drivers being falling investment to GDP ratio and the TFP component. Further decomposition of investment and TFP demonstrates that domestic and external factors each account for 25-30% of the slowdown.

No abstract

The paper estimates dynamic effects of pandemics on GDP per capita with local projections, controlling for the effects of wars and weather conditions, using a novel dataset that covers 33 countries and stretches back to the thirteenth century. On average, pandemics are found to have prolonged and highly statistically significant effects on GDP per capita—a pandemic killing 1% of the population tends to increase GDP per capita by approx. 0.3% after about 20 years. The study of a more detailed dataset available for the UK reveals that this results mainly from an increase in per capita land and a disproportionate impact of pandemics on low-productivity workers, while monetary expansion, institutional change and innovation could also play some role. At the same time, the effects of pandemics are found to vary with scale and across time and countries, with positive effects present following the Black Death and the Spanish flu pandemics, especially in Northern Europe. This suggests that only the largest and most unexpected pandemics have a positive impact on income.