2009 Reports

Growth Rates, Economic Structures, and Energy Use

Ocampo, Jose A.; Rada, Codrina; Taylor, Lance

This chapter is about the growth and development performance of non-industrialized countries in the latter part of the twentieth century, in particular the "great divergence" of their growth rates of per capita GDP from those of the industrial world since around 1980 until the early part of the 2000s that was illustrated in Chapter 2. The goal is to explore the factors underlying observed patterns of growth, and trace out plausible lines of causation for their diversity. The analysis follows Kuznets (1966) in attempting to organize the data in such a way as to highlight salient relationships, or the lack thereof, among key economic variables.