In 1996, the IMF and the World Bank introduced the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative — a comprehensive debt relief program aimed at reducing the external debt burden of eligible countries to sustainable levels, provided they carry out strong programs of macroeconomic adjustment and...

Offshore use of the renminbi expanded rapidly in Hong Kong SAR as China sought to develop an international role for its currency while maintaining capital controls. This prompts two questions addressed in this paper: How far advanced is renminbi internationalization? And, what role does Chinese...

The First Millennium Development Goal (MDG#1) is to cut the fraction of global population living on less than one dollar per day in half, by 2015. Foreign aid financed investments may contribute to the attainment of this goal. But how much can aid be reasonably expected to accomplish? A...

We examine the cyclical properties of development aid using bilateral data for 22 donors and over 100 recipients during 1970‒2005. We find that bilateral aid flows are on average pro-cyclical with respect to business cycles in donor and recipient countries. However, they become...

This paper studies the role of fiscal policies and institutions in building resilience in sub-Saharan African countries during 1990-2013, with specific emphasis on a group of twenty-six countries that were deemed fragile in the 1990s. As the drivers of fragility and resilience are closely...

The typical size distribution of manufacturing plants in developing countries has a thick left tail compared to developed countries. The same holds across Indian states, with richer states having a much smaller share of their manufacturing employment in small plants. In this paper, I explore the...

The paper reviews and draws lessons from the experience of fast growing economies including a sub-set of these termed High Growth Economies (HGEs) with a decadal rate of over 7 per cent. It then reviews the history of the Indian growth acceleration following the reforms of the 1990s and its...

This paper studies structural changes underlying China's remarkable and unprecedented growth in recent years. While patterns of structural transformation across China's provinces are broadly in line with international experience, one important difference is in labor productivity differentials...

China's current growth model — which has delivered steady and robust growth for two decades and lifted some 500 million individuals out of poverty — has become too reliant on credit and investment, and has begun to experience diminishing returns. Delays in advancing the government's reform...