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 study explores China's economic growth performance and prospects in global and Asian comparative perspectives. Using a general framework of cross-country analysis, the study identifies and discusses major factors underlying China's strong growth over the past decades and those contributing...

While discussing the enhancement of the connectivity between Europe and Asia, this policy paper explores a new area of cooperation, which is the use of European long-term investment funds in Asia's infrastructure. We argue that, if Asian countries agree to offer 50% of their spillover revenue to...

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...

Based on required growth rate and actual growth rate, this paper proposes a method to construct measures to indicate the probability of a country escaping the middle income trap (MIT). A second contribution of this paper is to model this probability using 1960–2015 cross-country data, focusing...

As China becomes more closely entwined with the US, positive shocks in the US translate into positive outcomes for China, but the extent of gain for the US during the convergence process is less clear. We develop an empirical framework of two interacting open economies in which Chinese GDP per...

The problem faced by many of the economies making up the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is whether they can avoid the middle-income trap and advance to the high-income level. What is needed for them to avoid the middle-income trap? This paper attempts to answer this question by...

This paper studies the catching-up process in per capita income of the so-called Asian Dragons and Tigers. It contributes to the literature in several ways. First, it tests the catching-up hypothesis using the longest time span ever considered, from 1870 to 2014. Second, it documents the...

Certain stylized facts are common among successful economic latecomers: an inverse U-shaped gross domestic product and capital per capita growth rate, high growth rates during the catch-up period, and rapid structural changes. This paper, for the first time, proposes a general equilibrium...