Central America experienced moderate growth during the last decade, including in the years leading up to the global financial crisis, but the rate of convergence toward advanced country income levels has still been slow. Moreover, forecasts imply that these trends will continue. What can be done...

Using a simple growth accounting framework, we project India's future potential output growth rate through 2025. We argue that there is perhaps more upside potential than downside risks to our central estimate of annual growth, which is close to 7 percent for aggregate output, or 5.5 percent for...

The purpose of this paper is to empirically determine the effects of political instability on economic growth. Using the system-GMM estimator for linear dynamic panel data models on a sample covering up to 169 countries, and 5-year periods from 1960 to 2004, we find that higher degrees of...

Mauritius’s economic performance has been called “the Mauritian miracle†and the “success of Africa†(Romer, 1992; Frankel, 2010; Stiglitz, 2011), despite difficult initial conditions that led a Nobel Prize Winner in economics to predict stagnation (Meade, 1961). We use growth...

Analysis of 1960-2002 data shows that average real GDP growth in sub-Saharan Africa was low and decelerated continuously before starting to recover in the second part of the 1990s. Growth was driven primarily by factor accumulation with little role for total factor productivity (TFP) growth. The...

This paper assesses productivity trends in Canada vis-a-vis the United States from two perspectives. The first one is based on estimates of total factor productivity. The second one decomposes productivity growth into two sources: investment-specific technical change, associated with...

This paper analyzes the weak growth performance in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region during 1980-2000 using an empirical model of long-run growth. The relative importance of the factors affecting growth is shown to vary across 16 MENA countries. In GCC countries, where oil revenues...

We investigate sources of economic fluctuations in Chile during 1998-2007 within the framework of a standard neoclassical growth model with time-varying frictions (wedges). We analyze the relative importance of efficiency, labor, investment, and government/trade wedges for business cycles in...

This paper analyzes factors that determine recent economic growth in the low-income countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States.2 The main findings are as follows: (1) productivity gains in export-oriented sectors and expansion of exports may have become the main sources of growth in...

The output contractions during the initial transition stages in the Baltics and in Russia and the other CIS countries are examined across several dimensions, and the reliability of the available official statistics evaluated. The depth, length and breadth of the contractions are studied and set...