Growth and inequality in a small open economy

This paper employs an endogenous growth model to analyze the growth and inequality relation for a small open economy where agents differ in their initial endowments of capital stock and international bond-holdings. We analyze the impacts of different structural shocks through their effects on agents' relative wealth and their labor supply decisions. Both theoretical analysis and numerical simulations demonstrate that openness - access to an international capital market - enriches the growth-inequality relations from those of the corresponding closed economy. Specifically, we show that the growth and distributional consequences of structural shocks depend crucially on whether the underlying heterogeneity originates with the initial endowment of domestic capital or foreign bonds.