Benchmarking is intended to help gauge where economies rank relative to others. However, historically educational benchmarking has often elected to use indicators based on their ease of availability, rather than a clear and defined link between inputs and learning outcomes. In this paper, we...

Private-public partnership (PPP) methods are considered to be an effective way to narrow the gap between demand and supply of social infrastructure. If successfully pursued, PPP can deliver benefits to users, governments, and the private sector, or the so-called triple wins. Enhancing efficiency...

This paper analyzes the conduct and effects of macroprudential policy in 11 Asian economies. Of these, India, the People's Republic of China, and the Republic of Korea frequently used loan-to-value ratios and required reserve ratios even before the global financial crisis. India and the People's...

This paper examines the fiscal and monetary policy options available to the People's Republic of China (PRC) as a sovereign currency-issuing nation operating in a dollar standard world. The paper first summarizes a number of issues facing the PRC, including the possibility of slower growth and a...

Although entrepreneurship plays a key role in economic development, it remains largely unknown. The reason is that it is challenging to measure entrepreneurship objectively and identify its determinants. In this paper, we analyze the effect of a particular feature of the institutional landscape,...

Contingent claims analysis applied to Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, the Republic of Korea, and Thailand shows no particular vulnerability to sovereign debt distress during recent years. However, the highly volatile "distance to distress" measure suggests that any of these countries may...

As the global crisis hit developing Asia, several countries instituted fiscal stimulus measures to create domestic demand. With the region returning to normal times, in this paper we draw lessons using historical data from 10 developing Asian countries to examine if countercyclical fiscal policy...

This paper examines the fiscal and monetary policy options available to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a sovereign currency-issuing nation operating in a dollar standard world. The paper first summarizes a number of issues facing the PRC, including the possibility of slower growth and...

Developing Asia has undergone a dramatic shift over the past 5 decades from a region of mainly lowincome economies toward one that is largely middle income. Compared with world aggregate data, developing Asia now has a much greater proportion of middle-income economies. The region faces the...

We present three conditions for a demography-driven middle-income trap and show that many economies in East, South, and Southeast Asia satisfy all of them. The conditions are (1) support ratio - the ratio of workers to consumers - matters for economic growth, (2) economic development accompanies...