This paper examines the variation in life cycle growth across the universe of Mexican firms. We establish two stylized facts to motivate our analysis: first, we show that firm size matters for development by illustrating a close correlation with state-level per capita incomes. Second, we show...

Emerging Europe has undergone a major economic transformation over the past 25 years. Most countries experienced initial drops in output during transition, followed by recovery in the second half of the 1990s. The path of transition in the Western Balkans has however been particularly uneven....

This paper seeks to document key characteristics of small island states in the Pacific. It restricts itself to a limited number of indicators which are macro-orientated - population, fertility of land, ability to tap into economies of scale, income, and geographic isolation. It leaves aside...

This paper provides a broad empirical analysis of the determinants of post-conflict economic transitions across the world during the period 1960-2010, using a dynamic panel estimation approach based on the system-generalized method of moments. In addition to an array of demographic, economic,...

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...

Do growth spells in Africa end because of bad realizations of the same factors that influence growth spells in the rest of the world, or because of different factors altogether? To answer this question, we examine determinants of growth spells in Africa and the rest of the world using Bayesian...

The paper analyzes Jamaica's experience of low growth despite consistently high investment. Cross-country analysis provides evidence of a significant and negative relationship between total public debt and productivity growth. Looking at the specific channels through which high debt affects...

China's digital economy has expanded rapidly in recent years. While average digitalization of the economy remains lower than in advanced economies, digitalization is already high in certain regions and sectors, in particular e-commerce and fintech, and costal regions. Such transformation has...

Economic performance in many emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) improved substantially over the past twenty years. The past decade was particularly good-for the first time EMDEs spent more time in expansion and had smaller downturns thanadvanced economies. In this paper we document...

This paper seeks to determine the effects that natural disasters have on per capita GDP and on the debt to GDP ratio in the Caribbean. Two types of natural disasters are studied –storms and floods– given their prevalence in the region, while considering the effects of both moderate and...