Biographical note: Justin Yifu Lin is founding director and professor at the China Centre for Economic Research at Peking University. From 2008 to 2012, he served as chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank. His many books include "Demystifying the Chinese Economy" and...

Gradual change has been a hallmark of the Chinese reform experience, and China's success in its sequential approach makes it unique among the former command economies. Since 1979, with the inception of the continuing era of reform, the Chinese economy has flourished. Growth has averaged nine...

Each institutional arrangement in a financial system has both advantages and disadvantages in mobilizing savings, allocating capital, diversifying risks, and processing information when facilitating financial transactions. Meanwhile, the factor endowment in an economy at each stage of its...

As strategies for achieving sustainable growth in developing countries are re-examined in light of the financial crisis, it is critical to take into account structural change and its corollary, industrial upgrading. Economic literature has devoted a great deal of attention to the analysis of...

Active economic policies by developing countries’ governments to promote growth and industrialization have generally been viewed with suspicion by economists, and for good reasons: past experiences show that such policies have too often failed to achieve their stated objectives. But the...

This paper applies the Growth Identification and Facilitation Framework developed by Lin and Monga (2010) to Nigeria. It identifies as appropriate comparator countries China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam, and selects a wide range of industries in which these comparator countries may be losing...

Economic development is a process of continuous industrial and technological upgrading in which any country, regardless of its level of development, can succeed if it develops industries that are consistent with its comparative advantage, determined by its endowment structure. The secret winning...

The world is currently still struggling with the aftermath of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Following a description of the eruption, evolution and consequences of the global crisis, this paper reviews alternative hypotheses for the causes of the global financial crisis as...

As the world recovers only slowly from the 2008 financial crisis and Europe is facing a looming debt crisis, concerns have increased that the "new normal"-a period of high unemployment, low returns on investment, high risks, and low growth-may become protracted in advanced economies. If growth...

This paper provides an historical overview of both the evolution of the economic performance of the developing world and the evolution of economic thought on development policy. The 20th century was broadly characterized by divergence between high-income countries and the developing world, with...