Income inequality in Colombia has declined since the early 2000s but remains very high by international standards. Income dispersion largely originates from the labour market, which is characterised by a still high unemployment rate, a pervasive informal sector and a wide wage dispersion...

This paper explores the productivity impact of trade, product market and financial market policies over the last decade in China – a fast growing country where, despite significant reform action, regulatory stance remains still far from OECD standards. The paper makes a critical distinction...

Turkey’s business sector dynamism has underpinned broad-based and inclusive growth in the 2000s. However, the business sector is highly segmented, with a relatively small core of modern high-productivity corporations, and myriad small, less formal and low-productivity entities. This hampers...

Turkey’s manufacturing sector has expanded considerably but not efficiently and competitively enough. This paper documents the drivers of its recent growth and diversification, and the factors that have held it back. It documents its segmentation and the outsized tail of poorly performing...

Spain has chronically low productivity growth, which undermines its ability to generate higher living standards. Important contributors to low productivity growth are the misallocation of capital to low productivity firms and under-investment in knowledge-based capital. To foster a better...

The global financial crisis and its high economic and social costs have revived academic and policy interest in “early warning indicators” of crises. This paper aims to investigate the performance of vulnerability indicators as advance warning indicators of past severe GDP per capita...

Italy’s policy of fiscal consolidation and growth-friendly structural reforms has substantially improved its economic prospects, but the adverse sentiment that the country has faced in the sovereign bond market over the past years has deep roots. It reflects lingering anxieties over the euro...

This paper puts the original Reinhart-Rogoff dataset, made public by Herndon et al. (2013), to a formal econometric test to pin down debt thresholds endogenously. We show that the nonlinear relation from debt to growth is not very robust. Taken with a pinch of salt, our results suggest, however,...

Notwithstanding a very strong economic performance over the past decade or so, Poland’s per capita income is substantially lower in comparison with the United States and per capita income growth will be sharply slowing down over the coming decades under the scenario of gradual policy changes...

The economics profession seems to increasingly endorse the existence of a strongly negative nonlinear effect of public debt on economic growth. Reinhart and Rogoff (2010) were the first to point out that a public debt-to-GDP ratio higher than 90% of GDP is associated with considerably lower...