What major insights have emerged from development economics in the past decade, and how do they matter for the World Bank? This challenging question was recently posed by World Bank Group President David Malpass to the staff of the Development Research Group. This paper assembles a set of 13...

Global potential output growth has been flagging. At 2.5 percent in 2013-17, post-crisis potential growth is 0.5 percentage point below its longer-term average and 0.9 percentage point below its average a decade ago. Compared with a decade ago, potential growth has declined 0.8 percentage point...

Growth in emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs) has generally disappointed since the 2009 global recession, with sizable forecast downgrades in most years. EMDEs continue to face downside risks to growth outlook over the next couple of years. These include heightened global policy...

Emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs) weathered the 2009 global recession relatively well. However, the impact of the global recession varied across economies. EMDEs with stronger pre-crisis fundamentals - such as large foreign exchange reserves, sound fiscal positions, and low...

Estimates of total factor productivity growth, a measure of increases in the efficiency of production, have traditionally been based on a two-factor model of labor and fixed capital. Because profits are measured residually in the System of National Accounts, they implicitly include rents on...

This paper studies future poverty, inequality, and shared prosperity outcomes using a panel data set with 150 countries over 1980-2014. The findings suggest that global extreme poverty will decrease in absolute and relative terms in the period 2015-2030. However, absolute poverty is likely to...

This paper reviews the determinants of Latin America's uneven growth based on an accounting decomposition that breaks down countries' growth (relative to the world) into three trade-related channels: (i) an export pull measuring the traction exerted by the country's exports, (ii) an external...

This paper summarizes the World Bank's approach to identifying parameters for key equations in its macro structural model for countries where short sample sizes or major structural changes render traditional time-series approaches infeasible or yield unstable estimates. To identify parameters...

There are currently 31 countries classified as low income, less than half the number in 2001. Rapid growth in low-income countries from 2001 to 2018 allowed many to progress to middle-income status, supported by the commodity price boom of 2001-11, debt relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor...

This paper explores the sovereign-bank nexus in emerging markets and developing economies: the interconnectedness between the health of the sovereign and the banking system. Data from 140 emerging markets and developing economies suggest that this nexus is rising. First, banks have increased...