Examination of special cases assists understanding of the mechanics of long-run economic growth more generally. Australia and California are two economies having the rare distinction of achieving 150 years of sustained high and rising living standards for rapidly expanding populations. They are...

While output declined in virtually all transition economies in the initial years, the speed and extent of the recovery that followed has varied widely across these countries. The contrast between the more and less successful transitions, the latter largely in the former Soviet Union, raises many...

The paper presents empirical findings regarding the economic policy consequences of constitutional arrangements, in three different dimensions. First, the data are consistent with several theoretical predictions about the consequences of electoral rules and forms of government for fiscal policy...

Foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs) account for well over half of all Chinese exports and this share continues to grow. While the substantial presence of FIEs has contributed greatly to the recent export-led growth of China, an important objective of the Chinese government is to ultimately...

We use data from the aggregate stock market and dividend futures to quantify how investors' expectations about economic growth evolve across horizons in response to the coronavirus outbreak and subsequent policy responses until June 2020. Dividend futures, which are claims to dividends on the...

The 1980s were a lost decade for Latin America, will the 1990s also be lost? For some countries stabilization has not even started. In other countries the stabilization accomplishments remain tentative and vulnerable. And even those countries that have established firmly a new path for their...

State business climate indexes capture state policies that might affect economic growth. State rankings in these indexes vary wildly, raising questions about what the indexes measure and which policies are important for growth. Indexes focused on productivity do not predict economic growth,...

While openness to trade is a well-recognized hallmark of many successful emerging market economies known as "growth miracles," another component of the growth model is a leapfrogging strategy - the use of policies to guide the industrial structural transformation ahead of a country's factor...

Most of the future growth in energy use is forecast to come from the developing world. Understanding the likely pace and specific location of this growth is essential to inform decisions about energy infrastructure investments and to improve greenhouse gas emissions forecasts. We argue that...