Aggregate investment has declined markedly over the crisis and has yet to recover. Reviving domestic and foreign investment is crucial to supporting the economic recovery, deepen Greece’s integration into global value chains and raising living standards. This will hinge primarily on improving...

A recent wave of economic research has studied the transformation of China from a poor country in the 1970s to a middle-income economy today. Based on this literature, we discuss the factors driving China’s development process. We provide a historical account of China’s rise, fall, and...

Evaluations of group savings and lending programs have largely focused on average impacts, rather than distributional impacts -- finding modest effects on long-term economic well-being. In this paper, we exploit the randomized roll-out of a self-help group lending program in rural Bihar, India...

Productivity in Turkey has been growing stronger than in most peer countries since 2010 but has slowed down. Despite a remarkably entrepreneurial population, business dynamism has also been less vigorous in recent years. This working paper discusses the factors behind this slowdown and analyses...

While small- and medium sized firms in Austria are generally more productive, export more, and engage more in higher technology activities than in comparable countries, they need to adapt better to the knowledge economy to maintain their relative performance levels. The capital structure of...

Boosting investment is key to supporting the nascent recovery and reviving stagnant productivity. Aggregate investment has declined markedly since the start of the global financial crisis, especially in services. Italy’s investment is so low that the capital stock is now declining, hurting...

Low investment rates are limiting Brazil’s future potential growth rate. This paper analyses a number of potential reasons for these low investment rates and discusses policy options to achieve faster capital accumulation. A shortage of domestic saving appears to be a major constraint to...

Purpose – Since 1999, China has undergone reform of its healthcare system. City-based social health insurance (SHI) is the primary form of current health insurance, supplemented by various commercial health insurance programs. The rural new cooperative medical system (NCMS) was introduced in...

This paper studies the joint dynamics of investor protection and economic development in a political economy model with capital accumulation and occupational choice. Less investor protection implies higher costs of external financing for entrepreneurs. This excludes poorer agents from...

This article aims to analyse the Feldstein-Horioka hypothesis, which suggests a strong correlation between investments and savings in advanced economies. Additionally, the analysis of the Feldstein-Horioka hypothesis was expanded to include emerging markets and developing economies in order to...