The paper reviews the “stylized facts” on economic growth gathered by Easterly and Levine in their 2001 joint paper and illustrates some of the points made on the basis of data from the IMF’s World Economic Outlook on real growth and per capita GDP since 1970. The data show that the growth...

This paper provides a broad empirical analysis of the determinants of post-conflict economic transitions across the world during the period 1960–2010, using a dynamic panel estimation approach based on the system-generalized method of moments. In addition to an array of demographic,...

This paper studies the impact of information and communication technologies (ICT), especially mobile phone rollout, on economic growth in a sample of African countries from 1988 to 2007. Further, we investigate whether financial inclusion is one of the channels through which mobile phone...

The “middle-income trap” is the phenomenon of hitherto rapidly growing economies stagnating at middle-income levels and failing to graduate into the ranks of high-income countries. In this study we examine the middle-income trap as a special case of growth slowdowns, which are identified as...

While production of ICT equipment plays a subordinate role for economic growth in most of these countries, they do benefit from capital deepening arising from falling prices of ICT equipment. Adapting established growth accounting approaches to the data environment of low-income countries, we...

This paper explores the effect of U.S. unconventional monetary policy (QE2) on a group of frontier developing economies (FDEs) in Asia. This paper finds that spillovers emanating from the U.S. on FDEs in Asia have been small. The relative insulation of emerging Asia from the global financial...

The paper describes six different methodologies that have been used to assess the equilibrium values of exchange rates and discusses their limitations. It applies several of the approaches to data for the United States as of 2006, illustrates that different approaches sometimes provide...

The paper shows that Asia's degree of financial integration, both with the world and within the region remains low by various measures. The paper also provides empirical evidence that greater financial integration can support economic rebalancing in statistically meaningful ways. The implication...

The paper investigates the determinants of business cycles synchronization across regions. It uses both international and intranational data to evaluate the linkages between trade in goods, trade in financial assets, specialization and business cycles synchronization using a system of...

Globalization has become the focus for a wide range of protests against various features of the world economy. This paper aims to give a concise summary of the economic dimensions of globalization, while leaving to one side other aspects—such as cultural, environmental, or political...