This paper seeks to shed some light on the extent to which infrastructure sub-sectors - energy, telecommunications, water supply, sanitation, and transport - contributed to growth in East Asia during 1985-2004. It also attempts to provide additional insights on whether the relationship between...

This paper examines whether infrastructure investment has contributed to East Asia's economic growth using both a growth accounting framework and cross-country regressions. For most of the variables used, both the growth accounting exercise and cross-country regressions fail to find a...

Production networks have been at the heart of the recent growth in trade among East Asian countries. Fragmentation trade, reflected mainly in the trade in parts and components, is expanding more rapidly than the conventional trade in final goods. This is mainly due to the relatively more...

No region has been more dynamic in recent years than East Asia. Despite its successful economic development, evaluations of the East Asian development model have often been capricious, shifting from quot;miraclequot; to quot;cronyism.quot; How can we explain East Asia's ups and downs...

This paper documents the existence of a "middle-income trap" for the Middle East and North Africa region. It argues that the economic woes of the Middle East and North Africa offer new insights into the debate on the trap which has thus far focused on the East Asia and Pacific region. The...

From free people to a unified Thai kingdom in the mid-14th century (Siam until 1939), and from that to Asian Tiger (or Dragon). Although Thailand saw Japanese's brief invasion in 1941, it has never been colonized by a European power. Nevertheless, Thailand has witnessed repeated political...

Rule of Law rhetoric is all around us — in the business press, in the programs and publications of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Asian Development Bank (ADB), in bilateral development assistance projects, and even in US-China diplomatic dialogue. Notably, however, the...

At the least, this book summarizes and reconsiders many of the arguments and findings that supported and explained the economic “miracles” of the four East Asian economies of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of People's Republic of China (Hong Kong), Singapore, Chinese Taipei...

This paper analyzes the macroeconomic adjustment from the crisis in East Asia in a broad international prospective. The stylized pattern from the previous 160 currency crisis episodes over the period from 1970 to 1995 shows a V-type adjustment of real GDP growth in the years prior to and...