Successful reductions in poverty, resulting from substantial increases in income and structural transformation, have been associated with growing levels of income inequality. This paper explores the link between structural transformation and inequality in Indonesia by applying Theil's L...

This study examines the relationship between firm characteristics and borrowing from commercial banks by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and five Southeast Asian economies (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Viet Nam). Analysis...

This paper studies factors associated with firm participation in export markets, focusing primarily on firm size and access to credit, based on a survey sample comprising observations of 8,080 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) (with fewer than 100 employees) and non-SME firms in developing...

This paper revisits the role of the manufacturing sector during the middle-income stage. By exploiting a large dataset that covers internationally comparable sectoral information, we prove that the manufacturing sector is imbued with three important characteristics. First, for middle-income...

Urbanization usually occurs with structural transformation driven by a "push" from agricultural productivity growth and a "pull" from industrial productivity growth, and usually the former exceeds the latter. This paper presents a simple model to illustrate how the open policy in the People's...

The People's Republic of China (PRC) has been undergoing marvelous industrialization and manufacturing development in the past decades, which has promoted its fast economic growth and has reached a level of middle-income in recent years. It is widely accepted that the PRC's status as the...

This study investigates the economic growth and catch-up of the Republic of Korea over the past half-century. The gap of output per worker between the Republic of Korea and United States has decreased rapidly, as the Republic of Korea's lower per capita income, relative to its potential level,...

This paper explores the impacts of more rapid growth in labor productivity in the service sector in Asia based on an empirical general equilibrium model. The model allows for input-output linkages and capital movements across industries and economies, and consumption and investment dynamics. We...

The paper investigates the situation of middle-income economies around the world. Since 1965, only 18 economies with a population of more than 3 million and not dependent on oil exports have made the transition to being high income. Many more have not been able to move beyond the middle-income...

This paper estimates income polarization in the People'http://www.adb.org/publications/income-polarization-prc-trends-changess Republic of China (PRC) from 1978 to 2010 and decomposes the estimated polarization by population subgroup. In addition, a framework is proposed to disentangle a change...