; ; ; "ActiveFedora::Aggregation::ListSource" . a , ; "Building Blocks for Barriers to Riches"; ; "batchuser@example.com"; "Kocherlakota, Narayana Rao, 1963-"; "Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis"; "Development", "Technology Adoption", "Inequality", "Enforcement"; "O17 - Formal and Informal Sectors; Shadow Economy; Institutional Arrangements", "D42 - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design: Monopoly", "O11 - Macroeconomic Analyses of Economic Development"; "Total factor productivity (TFP) differs greatly across countries. In this paper, I provide a novel rationalization for these differences. I consider two environments, one in which enforcement is full and the other in which enforcement is limited. In both settings, manufactured goods can be produced using a high-TFP technology or a low-TFP technology; there is a fixed cost associated with adoption of the former. I suppose that the fixed cost is sufficiently small that adoption takes place in a symmetric Pareto optimum in the limited-enforcement setting. Under this condition, I prove two results. First, adoption takes place in all Pareto optima in the full-enforcement setting. Second, adoption may not take place in a Pareto optimum in the limited-enforcement setting, if the division of social surplus is sufficiently unequal. I conclude that limited enforcement and high inequality interact to create particularly strong barriers to riches (in the language of Parente and Prescott (1999, 2000)."^^; "2001-03"; "2019-08-19T15:42:12.587569988+00:00"^^; "https://doi.org/10.21034/sr.288"; ; "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/"; "Thu Nov 7 21:56:43 2019"; "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/"; "Research Paper"; "410"; "Staff report (Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Research Department)"; "288"; "Enforcement", "Development", "Technology Adoption", "Inequality"; ; ; ; ; "Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Research Department"; ; "Publication" . ; .