This paper documents the existence of a "middle-income trap" for the Middle East and North Africa region. It argues that the economic woes of the Middle East and North Africa offer new insights into the debate on the trap which has thus far focused on the East Asia and Pacific region. The...

This paper examines whether domestic output growth helps attract capital inflows and, in turn, capital inflows help boost output growth in a set of 38 Sub-Saharan African countries. Using a two-step approach to address reverse causality and omitted variable issues, the paper finds that output...

This paper studies interactions between access to finance, product innovation, and labor supply in a two-period overlapping generations model with an endogenous skill distribution and credit market frictions. In the model lack of access to finance (induced by high monitoring costs) has an...

This paper studies the long-run impact of policies aimed at fostering gender equality on economic growth in Brazil. The first part provides a brief review of gender issues in the country. The second part presents a gender-based, three-period OLG model that accounts for women's time allocation...

This note examines in detail Brazil?s export performance over the past 15 years, focusing not only on growth and composition, but also on different performance dimensions, including diversification, sophistication, and firm dynamics. The analysis uses international comparisons to better situate...

This paper studies the existence of middle-income growth traps in a two-period overlapping generations model of economic growth with two types of labor and endogenous occupational choices. It also distinguishes between "basic" and "advanced" infrastructure, with the latter promoting design...

This paper studies the growth effects of externalities associated with intergenerational health transmission, health persistence, and women's occupational constraints-- with particular emphasis on the role of access to infrastructure. The first part provides a review of the evidence on these...

This paper surveys the academic and policy debate on the roots of global imbalances, their role in the inception of the global crisis, and their prospects in its aftermath. The conventional view holds that global imbalances result primarily from unsustainably high demand for goods in the United...

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...

This paper studies the growth effects of externalities associated with intergenerational health transmission, health persistence, and women's occupational constraints-- with particular emphasis on the role of access to infrastructure. The first part provides a review of the evidence on these...