This paper compares achievements and inequities in standards of living across countries. Achievement is measured by an index, which is constructed to reflect greater achievement for an increase in the standard of living of a country that is already at a high level compared to that of another...

During the latter part of 2007 and early 2008, it became obvious that Pakistan's macroeconomic situation was deteriorating rapidly, and that unless immediate measures were taken, the country may slip into a balance of payments crisis. This paper analyzes Pakistan's current macroeconomic economic...

While developing Asia has recovered strongly from the global crisis, the region faces the medium- and long-term challenge of sustaining growth beyond the crisis. The central objective of this paper is to empirically investigate the sources of economic growth in 12 developing Asian economies...

We apply a stochastic frontier production model to data from 53 countries during 1991-2003 to estimate total factor productivity growth, and decompose it into technical efficiency change and technical progress. Our empirical results indicate that world productivity growth was led by fast-growing...

The demographic dividend that contributed substantially to economic growth in developing Asia in the past is dissipating. Population aging affects growth through savings, capital accumulation, labor force participation, and total factor productivity. We examined the impact of aging on those four...

Developing Asias rapid economic growth has been shifting the global economic and industrial centers of gravity away from the North Atlantic, raising the importance of Asia in world trade, and boosting SouthSouth trade. How will trade patterns change over the next 2 decades in the course of...

Using international data starting 1957, we construct a sample of cases where fast-growing economies slow down. The evidence suggests that rapidly growing economies slow down significantly, in the sense that the growth rate downshifts by at least 2 percentage points when their per capita incomes...

A sound and efficient financial system is an indispensable ingredient of economic growth. It consists primarily of banks and capital markets, which channel savings into investments and other productive activities that contribute to economic growth and augment the economy's productive capacity....