The emerging European economies have been converging rapidly towards the more advanced European economies in recent years. However, large external imbalances in parts of the region have raised questions about sustainability and concerns about vulnerabilities. Empirical evidence in this paper...

This paper documents that structural change positively contributed to labor productivity growth in Guinea during 2006-15. However, the contribution of structural change to productivity growth was modest (about one percentage point per year on average), because labor moved from agriculture, the...

Ethiopia has achieved sustained high growth for more than a decade. At the same time, the country has been facing several economic challenges, including falling exports, chronic foreign currency shortages, as well as a slow pace of structural transformation. In recent years, the already...

Ghana has experienced a decade of solid and exceptionally high growth. Between 2005 and 2015, income nearly doubled. This paper analyzes the factors driving this impressive growth performance, using tools such as structural change decompositions and growth regressions. For the comparative...

The Yugo, a communist-era car from the former Yugoslavia, was widely ridiculed for shedding its parts on roads across Europe and the United States. Zastava, which made Yugo, fared even worse than its product. After the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s, the factory was reduced to producing only...

This policy note was prepared in parallel to the report Pakistan at 100 - Shaping the Future. The report Pakistan at 100 discusses options to accelerate and sustain growth in Pakistan so that the country becomes an upper middle-income country when it turns hundred years old in 2047. This policy...

Drawing on international trade data, this paper uses the product space approach to analyze changes in Morocco's goods exports in 1990-2010 and future export priorities. The level of Morocco's gross domestic product and its moderate growth match the predictions of product space analysis, informed...

This paper presents evidence suggesting that the relationship between income and economic structure is shifting over time, with countries across the income distribution uniformly increasing the share of labor in service sectors and an increasingly less stark relationship between manufacturing...

Developing countries made considerable gains during the first decade of the 21st century. Their economies grew at unprecedented rates, resulting in large reduction in extreme poverty and a significant expansion of the middle class. But more recently that progress has slowed with an economic...