The Causes and Costs of Misallocation
探讨资源错配对跨国生产率差异的重要性、原因及动态代价，指出错配是重要渠道但无单一主导原因，且其对生产率增长的动态影响值得更多关注。
Why do living standards differ so much across countries? A consensus in the development literature is that differences in productivity are a dominant source of these differences. But what accounts for productivity differences across countries? One explanation is that frontier technologies and best practice methods are slow to diffuse to low-income countries. The recent literature on misallocation offers a distinct but complementary explanation: low-income countries are not as effective in allocating their factors of production to their most efficient use. We provide our perspective on three key questions. First, how important is misallocation? Second, what are the causes of misallocation? And third, beyond the direct cost of lower contemporaneous output, are there additional costs associated with misallocation? A summary of our answers is as follows: Misallocation appears to be a substantial channel in accounting for productivity differences across countries, but the measured magnitude of the effects depends on the approach and context. Researchers have not yet found a dominant source of misallocation; instead, many specific factors seem to contribute a small part of the overall effect. Beyond the static cost of misallocation, we believe that the dynamic effects of misallocation on productivity growth are significant and deserve much more attention going forward.