How much of China’s recent economic performance can be attributed to market-oriented reforms introduced in the last two decades? A long-run perspective may be important for understanding the process of economic development occurring today. This Paper compares the integration of rice markets in...

This Paper highlights a problem in using the first-differenced GMM panel data estimator to estimate cross-country growth regressions. When the time series are persistent, the first-differenced GMM estimator can be poorly behaved, since lagged levels of the series provide only weak instruments...

The paper shows that the current view of globalization as an automatic and benign force is flawed: it focuses on only one, positive, face of globalization while entirely neglecting a malignant one. The two key historical episodes that are adduced by the supporters of the “globalization as it...

Zimbabwe faces growth and external competitiveness challenges, as indicated by its low trend growth and investment, declining share in the world exports, high current account deficits, and external debt. The stock-flow approach to the equilibrium exchange rate reveals that the real exchange rate...

The objective of this paper is to discuss macroeconomic policies that would help African countries, especially the low income countries, reach strong, sustained and shared growth in the post-crisis world. The paper first reviews, with a special focus on LICs, macroeconomic policies in Africa...

We study the effect of a declining labor force on the incentives to engage in labor-saving technical change and ask how this effect is influenced by institutional characteristics of the pension scheme. When labor is scarcer it becomes more expensive and innovation investments that increase labor...

Cross-country evidence is presented on resource dependence and the link between volatility and growth. First, growth depends negatively on volatility of unanticipated output growth independent of initial income per capita, the average investment share, initial human capital, trade openness, the...