China is well-placed to avoid the so-called “middle-income trap” and to continue to converge towards the more advanced economies, even though growth is likely to slow from near double-digit rates in the first decade of this millennium to around 7% at the 2020 horizon. However, in order to...

Certain growth-promoting policies can have negative side-effects by increasing the vulnerability of economies to financial crises. Typical examples are greater openness to financial flows or more liberalised financial markets. This paper investigates whether the growth benefits of policy reforms...

This paper presents the results from a new model for projecting growth of OECD and major non-OECD economies over the next 50 years as well as imbalances that arise. A baseline scenario assuming gradual structural reform and fiscal consolidation to stabilise government-debt-to GDP ratios is...

Growth in emerging market economies (EMEs) is set to durably slow from the rates observed over 2010-12 as cyclical effects fade, potential growth declines and external financing conditions tighten. Large negative current account balances make some EMEs vulnerable to sudden reversals in capital...

Poland’s productivity has grown strongly over the past decade, and efforts to reduce the regulatory burden have been significant. Despite impressive progress, product market regulation remains more burdensome than in most OECD countries, partly due to the importance of red tape and the level...

This paper explores the relationship between policy settings and extreme positive and negative growth events, what we call GDP tail risks, using quantile regression methods. Conditioning on several country characteristics such as the size, stage of development and openness to trade as well as...

Using data from OECD countries over the past three decades, this paper shows that financial expansion has fuelled greater income inequality. Higher levels of credit intermediation and stock markets are both related with a more unequal distribution of income. Greater income inequality may not...

This report looks at procedures and processes related to non-tariff measures in agricultural trade. Based on the prior that countries are likely to make efforts to reduce the trade hindering effects of domestic food regulation within regional trade agreements, we focus on three different RTAs,...

Divestment by multinational enterprises is an important yet understudied phenomenon. The few available estimates indicate that about a fifth of all foreign affiliates are divested every five years. This paper presents the findings from a novel cross-country firm-level dataset with financial and...