This research is one of the few attempts to analyze chronic and transient poverty in the Philippines. Results indicate that poverty in the Philippines is largely comprised of chronic poverty with households in rural areas and Mindanao regions being the most affected. Using quantile regressions,...

This book, written by an international team of economists, develops concrete, country specific alternatives to inflation targeting, the dominant policy framework of central bank policy that focuses on keeping inflation in the low single digits to the virtual exclusion of other key goals such as...

This paper reconsiders the argument that empirical estimations of aggregate production functions may be interpreted merely as statistical artefact. The reason is that Occam's razor, or Herbert Simon's principle of parsimony, suggests that the aggregate production function, together with the side...

This article surveys the recent empirical literature on total factor productivity (TFP) growth in East Asia, and the debate about the sources of growth in the region. It is concluded that: (i) the main merit of this literature is that it has helped focus the attention of scholars on the growth...

The growth diagnostics methodology pioneered by Hausmann et al. (2005) is becoming a key component of the toolkit for donor agencies to formulate their operational strategies. This paper aims at clarifying the primary objectives of the approach, and at highlighting some limitations for...

Since the early 1990s, the number of studies using neoclassical models to understand the Chinese economy has mushroomed. In this paper, we review two examples of estimation of the rate of technical progress and one attempt at modelling investment. We identify their shortcomings and the problems...

We forecast average annual GDP growth for 147 countries for 2010–2030. We use a cross-country regression model where the long-run fundamentals are determined by the countries’ accumulated capabilities and the capacity to undergo structural transformation.

An extensive literature argues that India’s manufacturing sector has underperformed, and that the country has failed to industrialize; in particular, it has failed to take advantage of its labor–abundant comparative advantage. India’s manufacturing sector is smaller as a share of GDP than...

This authoritative and stimulating book represents a fundamental critique of the aggregate production function, a concept widely used in macroeconomics.