We review the growth experience of middle-income countries. Economic factors associated with growth appear to differ between middle income and other countries. The efficiency of the financial system is importantly related to the growth rate in low- and middle-income countries, but appears to...

This paper reviews what the profession has learned during the last 25 years about East Asia's growth using growth accounting exercises and estimations of production functions. The publication of Alwyn Young's (1992, 1994, 1995) and Jong-Il Kim and Lawrence Lau's (1994) studies, and Paul...

This paper assesses the low-carbon economy in Asia: how large it is today and how well it will fare in the future. Using patent and trade data, it analyzes the potential of Asian economies to capture value from the design and export of low-carbon technologies, acknowledging that these are only...

This paper estimates the growth impact of disasters, with a focus on developing Asia and its subregions. It finds that severe disasters slow down annual growth in the Pacific island countries by between 1 and 2 percentage points on average. This should come as no surprise, given these economies'...

The purpose of this study is twofold. The first is to develop a new composite index of globalization based on data on 158 economies over the period 2006−2014. The second intention is to use the new index to evaluate empirically the possible effects of globalization on economic growth and...

The rapid accumulation of private debt is widely viewed as a major risk to financial and economic stability. This paper systematically and comprehensively assesses the effect of private debt buildup on economic growth. In the spirit of Mian, Sufi, and Verner (2017) that separately examine the...

A large empirical literature finds that financial development is beneficial for economic growth, although some recent evidence suggests otherwise. We contribute to the finance-growth literature by examining the role of credit growth skewness and long-run growth. Earlier literature found that...

Exiting the middle-income trap entails costly improvements in state capacity. That deep economic integration induces powerful actors to support increasing state capacities remain underresearched. Here we ask: Under what conditions can deep economic integration yield increases in state capacity?...

We examine the importance of total factor productivity (TFP) growth in middle-income countries based on cross-country panel data for the period 1975-2014. We find that TFP growth contributed significantly to a country’s upward transition from middle-income to high-income country group. The TFP...

Developing Asia has undergone a dramatic shift over the past 5 decades from a region of mainly lowincome economies toward one that is largely middle income. Compared with world aggregate data, developing Asia now has a much greater proportion of middle-income economies. The region faces the...