During the past decade, there has been a tre-mendous advance in our understanding of eco-nomic development. On the one hand, the theoretical understanding of economic growth has progressed on various fronts, including among other topics of concern the investigation of endogenous technical innovation and increas-ing returns to scale (Paul Romer, 1986); the interaction of population, fertility, human capital, and growth; international spillovers in technol-ogy and capital accumulation; and the role of institutions. On the other hand, the increasing availability and use of standardized data sets, notably the important Penn World Tables data set (Robert Summers and Alan Heston, 1991), has led to a burgeoning empirical literature on cross-country growth, especially following the pathbreaking work of Robert Barro (1991). The conflicting claims in this large and growing literature are yet to be sorted out, which is understandable given the rapid increase in studies in recent years. This brief note cannot, of course, offer a real synthesis of the existing materials, but it can serve to highlight some of the key emerging themes in the literature and to put them in a new light. Therefore, we describe our own view of the recent literature on cross-country growth, present some of our own new empirical findings, and discuss the main directions for future research as we see them.