While India is distinctive among developing countries for its fast-growing service sector, sceptics have raised doubts about the quality and sustainability of this service-sector growth and its implications for economic development. We show, consistent with the views of the sceptics, that while...

The positive association between the service sector share of output and per capita income is one of the best-known regularities in all of growth and development economics. Yet there is less than complete agreement on the nature of that association. Here we identify two waves of service sector...

Could a high-access, quick-disbursing %u201Cinsurance facility%u201D in the IMF help to reduce the incidence of sharp interruptions in capital flows (%u201Csudden stops%u201D)? We contribute to the debate on this question by analyzing the impact of conventional IMF-supported programs on the...

Using international data starting in 1957, we construct a sample of cases where fast-growing economies slow down. The evidence suggests that rapidly growing economies slow down significantly, in the sense that the growth rate downshifts by at least 2 percentage points, when their per capita...

We describe in this essay why the gold standard and the euro are extreme forms of fixed exchange rates, and how these policies had their most potent effects in the worst peaceful economic periods in modern times. While we are lucky to have avoided another catastrophe like the Great Depression in...

We examine the impact of renminbi revaluation on firm valuations, considering two surprise announcements of changes in China's exchange rate policy in 2005 and 2010 and data on 6,050 firms in 44 countries. Renminbi appreciation has a positive effect on firms exporting to China but little...

We assemble data on the structure of bank supervision, distinguishing supervision by the central bank from supervision by a nonbank governmental agency and independent from dependent governmental supervisors. Using observations for 140 countries from 1998 through 2010, we find that supervisory...

We analyze disagreements over de facto exchange-rate-regime classifications using three popular de facto regime data series. While there is a moderate degree of concurrence across classifications, disagreements are not uncommon, and they are not random. They are most prevalent in middle-income...

This paper documents the effects of exchange rates and the external constraint during the interwar years. In the absence of international policy coordination, exchange rate depreciation is shown to have been a necessary precondition for the adoption of policies promoting recovery from the Great...

Using panel data and case studies, we analyze the pre-1970 history of international capital flows and current account reversals. Considering a sample of emerging markets and advanced economies with per capita GDPs at least 60 per cent those of the lead country, we show that the incidence of...