The combination of stagnant growth and high levels of income inequality renewed the debate about whether a more even distribution of income can spur economic activity. This paper tests for cross-country convergence in income inequality and estimates its impact on economic growth with a...

We study whether higher gender equality facilitates economic growth by enabling better allocation of a valuable resource: female labor. By allocating female labor to its more productive use, we hypothesize that reducing gender inequality should disproportionately benefit industries with...

Using panel data for a large number of countries, we find that economic contractions are not followed by offsetting fast recoveries. Trend output lost is not regained, on average. Wars, crises, and other negative shocks lead to absolute divergence and lower long-run growth, whereas we find...

This paper presents a novel framework to estimate the elasticity between nighttime lights and quarterly economic activity. The relationship is identified by accounting for varying degrees of measurement errors in nighttime light data across countries. The estimated elasticity is 1.55 for...

This paper examines real and financial linkages between Saudi Arabia and other GCC countries. Growth spillovers from Saudi Arabia to Bahrain are found to be sizeable and statistically significant, but those to other GCC countries are not found to be significant. Equity market movements in Saudi...

In the last few decades, real GDP growth and investment in advanced countries have declined in tandem. This slowdown was not the result of weak demand (there has been no shift along the Okun curve), but of a decline in potential output growth (which has shifted the Okun curve to the left). We...

This paper uses panel data for 19 OECD countries and finds support for the hypothesis that a greater degree of product variety relative to the United States helps to explain relative per capita GDP levels. The empirical work relies upon some direct measures of product variety calculated from...

We investigate the relation between changes in tax composition and long-run economic growth using a new dataset covering a broad cross-section of countries with different income levels. We specifically consider 69 countries with at least 20 years of observations on total tax revenue during the...

Issues of taxation and development, which have long been a central concern of the IMF, have attracted wider and renewed interest in the last few years. This paper reflects on three broad lessons of experience: that developing countries differ vastly in tax matters, and in ways that are less than...

The aim of this paper is to provide new estimates of employment-output elasticities and assess the effect of structural and macroeocnomic policies on the employment-intensity of growth. Using an unbalanced panel of 167 countries over the period 1991-2009, the results suggest that structural...