To this day, policy makers, policy advisers, and economists in development institutions do not have any practical tools to help them to assess the impacts of policies aimed at promoting gender equality and quantify the effect of these policies on growth. Yet, there has been limited effort in...

An abundance of natural resources is intuitively expected to be a blessing. Nonetheless, it has been argued for some decades that large endowments of natural resources oil, gas, and minerals in particular may actually become more of a curse, often leading to slow economic growth and...

This note examines one of the most fundamental questions to emerge from the Great Recession of 2007-9: how to regrow global economic growth going forward? Although all are painfully aware that it may be 2013 or 2014 before the global economy returns to normalcy, no one is sanguine about medium-...

The Asian style of regional integration may be seen as a 'quasi-common economy' that eschews a formal linkup in political or monetary terms, but manages to generate similar results by strong physical integration and distributed chains of production and service delivery. This note proposes the...

Sovereign ratings are a necessary condition for countries to fully access international capital. Even if the sovereign government is not issuing bonds, the sovereign rating often acts as a 'ceiling' for the private sector and can influence its international capital market access. However, 58...

Could either monetary policy or financial prudential regulation be relied on individually to mitigate asset price cycles or their effects? If both ways are effective, monetary policy and prudential regulation could then be considered 'substitutes,' in the sense that the individual use of either...

In the past two decades, there has been a growing engagement between development and human rights practitioners and thinkers. But are participants in this dialogue still mainly talking past each other? Or has there been valuable cross-fertilization and learning-the Millennium Development Goals...

An energetic debate on the danger of a global currency war has flared up in recent months, stoked by a renewed move to 'quantitative easing' in the United States, resurgent capital flows to developing countries and strong upward pressure on emerging market currencies. This economic premise views...

The recovery in advanced economies is now exhibiting several signs of fragility and the medium-term growth prospects for these economies also look difficult. Could developing economies 'switch over' to become locomotives in the global economy, providing a countervailing force against downward...

As the global stock of ideas expands and diffuses across and within countries, technological learning is poised to become an even more important determinant of growth through its impact on innovation. This note reviews global trends that make a policy focus on technological learning and...