ABSTRACT
This chapter constructs the world technology frontier and measures the efficiency of the 51 countries in two specified samples. Efficiency scores obtained both with and without account of mineral and energy rents are compared and then regressed on resource wealth and other potential determinants of efficiency. The chapter discusses the decomposes growth of labour productivity into components attributable to technological change, technological catch-up and capital accumulation, contrasting the original specification with those where resource rents are subtracted from the output figures. It outlines some decomposition factors to construct counterfactual income distributions and explain the observed transformation of income distribution from unimodal to bimodal. A two-stage regression analysis of the efficiency indexes opens the possibility that the relationship between natural resource rent and efficiency can be positive, and indeed was positive at the beginning of the 1970–1990 period.
