This paper studies structural changes underlying China's remarkable and unprecedented growth in recent years. While patterns of structural transformation across China's provinces are broadly in line with international experience, one important difference is in labor productivity differentials...

This policy note outlines short, and medium-term policy options for addressing critical challenges affecting labor markets in Mexico, and in particular labor productivity. As labor is the main source of income for most of the population, poverty is closely linked to underemployment and low...

Reducing the footprint of growth requires a focus on three key issues: a) transforming urban areas into greener, more efficient, resilient, and socially inclusive cities, better able to capture the economic benefits associated with urbanization; b) ensuring sound management of the brown...

This paper looks at the empirical record whether big infrastructure and public capital drives have succeeded in accelerating economic growth in low-income countries. It looks at big long-lasting drives in public capital spending, as these were arguably clear and exogenous policy decisions. On...

Effective public investment requires governments to address the "recurrent cost problem" to ensure operations and maintenance (O&M) expenditures are sufficient to sustain the flow of productive public capital services to private factors of production. Building on the model of Buffie et al...

Following very strong growth during the period 2000–12, emerging market economies (EMEs) experienced a slowdown in the last couple of years. This paper examines the supply-side drivers of the strong growth performance of 63 EMEs and investigates if the recent slowdown in growth is...

In this paper, we study the optimal mix of monetary and macroprudential policies in an estimated two-country model of the euro area. The model includes real, nominal and financial frictions, and hence both monetary and macroprudential policy can play a role. We find that the introduction of a...

This paper documents the recent slowdown in investment in India and explores its underlying causes. The sharp investment deceleration has sparked an intense debate about the role of interest rates, as well as business confidence and economic policy uncertainty. Our results suggest that while...

Existing economic indicators and indexes assess economic activity but no single indicator measures the general macro-economic performance of a nation, state, or region in a methodologically simple and intuitive way. This paper proposes a simple, yet informative metric called the Economic...

This paper studies the linkage between structural coherence and economic growth. Structural coherence is defined as the degree that a country's industrial structure optimally reflects its factor endowment fundamentals. The paper found that at least for the overall capital, the shares of capital...