This paper assesses productivity trends in Canada vis-a-vis the United States from two perspectives. The first one is based on estimates of total factor productivity. The second one decomposes productivity growth into two sources: investment-specific technical change, associated with...

This paper analyzes the factors behind the recent growth of India's services sector. The high growth of services output in the 1990s was mostly due to the rapid expansion of communication, banking, business services (including the IT sector) and community services. While factors such as a high...

This paper analyzes the dynamic interactions between the precision of information, technological development, and welfare within an overlapping generations model. More precise information about idiosyncratic production shocks has ambiguous effects on technological progress and welfare, which...

Using a simple growth accounting framework, we project India's future potential output growth rate through 2025. We argue that there is perhaps more upside potential than downside risks to our central estimate of annual growth, which is close to 7 percent for aggregate output, or 5.5 percent for...

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 Selected Issues paper and Statistical Appendix reviews Mozambique’s impressive economic growth, its composition, and its impact on poverty reduction over the past decade. The paper highlights that improvements in total factor productivity, resulting from a stable macroeconomic...

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...

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...

This Selected Issues paper analyzes sustaining potential growth in Aruba. As in the other Caribbean countries, there are growing concerns in Aruba about the slowdown in economic growth over the past two decades and the consequent tepid outlook for potential growth. Tackling such concerns...

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...