South Asia has a huge need to create more and better jobs for a growing population especially in the manufacturing industries where it is underperforming as compared to East Asia. The report examines three critical and relatively understudied drivers of competitiveness: -Economies of...

Insurance market activity, both as a financial intermediary and a provider of risk transfer and indemnification, may contribute to economic growth by allowing different risks to be managed more efficiently and by mobilizing domestic savings. During the past decade, there has been faster growth...

The worldwide slowdown in growth after 1975 was a major negative fiscal shock. Slower growth lowers the present value of tax revenues and primary surpluses and thus makes a given level of debt more burdensome. Most countries failed to adjust to the negative fiscal consequences of the growth...

Global potential output growth has been flagging. At 2.5 percent in 2013-17, post-crisis potential growth is 0.5 percentage point below its longer-term average and 0.9 percentage point below its average a decade ago. Compared with a decade ago, potential growth has declined 0.8 percentage point...

If one region of the world switches its research effort from dirty to clean technologies, will other regions follow To investigate this question, this paper builds a North-South model that combines insights from directed technological change and quality-ladder endogenous growth models with...

This paper reviews the determinants of Latin America's uneven growth based on an accounting decomposition that breaks down countries' growth (relative to the world) into three trade-related channels: (i) an export pull measuring the traction exerted by the country's exports, (ii) an external...

After nearly two decades of strong economic growth, in 2005 the economy was in difficulties. The loss of trade preferences in textiles in 2005, the anticipation of prospective reform to the European Union's sugar protocol for 2006-10, and higher international oil prices had contributed to a...

This paper attempts to quantify the impact of economic policy uncertainty on overall trade and trade linked to global value chains. Using new data on policy uncertainty for 18 countries and 24 years, it finds a statistically significant negative impact of policy uncertainty on overall trade...

Trade can be a key driver of growth for African countries, as it has been for those countries, particularly in East Asia, that have experienced high and sustained rates of growth. Economic partnership agreements with the European Union could be instrumental in a competitiveness framework, but to...

Jim Yong Kim, President of the World Bank Group, addressed the topic of trade as an engine of growth. Advanced markets are experiencing low growth and in emerging markets, growth rates have fallen by almost 1 percentage point since 2013. This is not just about numbers, these economic...