Is there a tradeoff between raising growth and reducing inequality and poverty? This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on the complex links between growth, inequality, and poverty, with causation going in both directions. The evidence suggests that growth can be effective in...

This paper studies economic growth in Malaysia, with the purpose of assessing the potential to attain the status and characteristics of a high-income country. Future economic growth is simulated under a business-as-usual baseline, where the growth drivers follow their historical or recent...

This paper reviews the evolving literature that links financial development, financial crises, and economic growth in the past 20 years. The initial disconnect-with one literature focusing on the effect of financial deepening on long-run growth and another studying its impact on volatility and...

What major insights have emerged from development economics in the past decade, and how do they matter for the World Bank? This challenging question was recently posed by World Bank Group President David Malpass to the staff of the Development Research Group. This paper assembles a set of 13...

This is the background paper for the productivity extension of the World Bank's Long-Term Growth Model (LTGM). Based on an extensive literature review, the paper identifies the main determinants of economic productivity as innovation, education, market efficiency, infrastructure, and...

This paper addresses three questions: 1) what would have been the growth and income trajectory of Syria in the absence of war; 2) given the war, what explains the reduction in economic growth in terms physical capital, labor force, human capital, and productivity; and 3) what potential growth...

The reallocation of resources from low- to high-productivity firms can generate large aggregate productivity gains. The paper uses data from the Malaysian manufacturing census to measure the country's hypothetical productivity gains when moving toward the level of within-sector allocative...

Although conventional wisdom suggests that reducing military spending may improve a country’s economic growth performance, empirical studies have produced ambiguous results. This paper extends a standard growth model and estimates it using techniques that exploit both cross-section and...

This paper examines the determinants of growth for nine South Pacific countries during the period 1971-93, using the analytical framework of the Solow-Swan neoclassical growth model. Chamberlain’s II-matrix estimator is used to account for unobserved country-specific heterogeneity in the...

Several recent empirical studies have examined determinants of economic growth using country average (cross-section) data. In contrast, this paper employs a technique for using a panel of both cross-section and time-series data for 98 industrial and developing countries over 1960-85 to determine...