We develop a two-country (Home and Foreign) by two-good (consumption good and investment good) by one factor (capital) endogenous growth model with international knowledge spillover to study the relationship between an import tariff and economic growth and welfare. First, unlike the past literature, we do not need to make an assumption such that the growth rates between countries are identical in a balanced growth path (BGP). Second, we show that there exists a unique and saddle-point BGP with both countries being incompletely specialized. Third, a higher import tariff on the consumption good in the domestic country may boost (reduce) the rate of economic growth when the foreign (domestic) country has an absolute advantage in the investment good. Finally, a rise in the tariff rate by one country may improve world welfare under some parameter spaces.

Discussion has been made concerning pros and cons of the ways of financing public projects via either earmarking or general fund based upon a public finance approach. The paper studies the implications of desirability of earmarked and general fund based upon economic stabilization in a two-sector growth model. Regardless of the nature of public goods, earmarked tax contributes to aggregate stabilization, while general fund may be destabilizing and cause fluctuations. The underlying mechanism in favor of earmarked taxes against general fund is that general fund creates intersectoral externalities and strategic complementarities that is sufficiently large to exert endogenously persistent and recurring fluctuations in aggregate activities in the absence of shocks to fundamentals. Earmarked taxing generates only sector-specific externalities that are too small to exert local indeterminacy. In a calibrated version, we compute the level of long-run welfare and the results reflect favorably upon the use of earmarked taxing.

This paper studies the relationship between tariffs and economic growth in a two-country AK growth model. We find that a sufficiently higher tariff can increase or decrease economic growth, which depends on the levels of productivity coefficients in both countries. Moreover, the Ricardian theorem of comparative advantage holds in the long-run equilibrium and local indeterminacy emerges in the case of incomplete specialization under milder conditions compared with conventional literature.

Why is the economic growth rate so low in poor countries? This paper offers an explanation by using a simple two-sector AK growth model with intersectoral linkages and high relative prices of intermediate goods.Intersectoral linkages lead to two balanced growth paths (BGPs). The high-growth BGP is a source. The low-growth BGP is a sink because it has a small final goods sector, small intersectoral spillovers from the final goods sector to the intermediate goods sector, and small marginal products in the intermediate goods sector, yielding high relative prices of intermediate goods. The low-growth BGP is an attractor and thus development trap.To produce a big push effect, this paper analyzes the first-best policy and finds that a subsidy to own consumption and a provision of public goods to the final goods sector can internalize the external effect and render the low-growth BGP infeasible. As a result, there is only the high-growth BGP.

This paper studies an infinite-horizon two-sector growth model with sector-specific externalities and preferences that are non-separable between consumption and leisure. We find two main results. First, a larger income effect on the labor supply increases the possibility of macroeconomic instability. Second, a larger elasticity of the labor supply may increase or decrease the possibility of aggregate instability, depending on the intensity of the income effect. ÃEarly versions have benefited from comments and suggestions made by Leonor Modesto, Thomas Seegmuller, Alain Venditti and an anonymous reviewer. 1 Jaimovich and Rebelo (2009) also consider this class of utility functions to show that labor-supply income effects lie at the heart of the ability to generate aggregate and sectoral co-movement, which is a central feature of business cycles. In particular, they can generate aggregate co-movement in the presence of moderate labor-supply income effects, and low labor-supply income effects are essential to generate sectoral co-movement.