Ítem
Acceso Abierto
Seasons, savings and GDP
Título de la revista
Autores
Zuleta, Hernando
Fecha
2008
Directores
ISSN de la revista
Título del volumen
Editor
Universidad del Rosario
Citations
Métricas alternativas
Resumen
Abstract
The industrial revolution and the subsequent industrialization of the economies occurred Orst in temperate regions. We argue that this and the associated positive correlation between absolute latitude and GDP per capita is due to the fact that countries located far from the equator suffered more profound seasonal auctuations in climate, namely stronger and longer winters. We propose a growth model of biased innovations that accounts for these facts and show that countries located in temperate regions were more likely to create or adopt capital intensive modes of production. The intuition behind this result is that savings are used to smooth consumption; therefore, in places where output auctuations are more profound, savings are bigger. Because the incentives to innovate depend on the relative supply factors, economies where savings are bigger are more likely to create or adopt capital intensive technologies.
Palabras clave
Keywords
absolute latitude , seasons , endogenous growth , capital using innovations
