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...

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...

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...

This paper examines the effects of inflation targeting on industrial and emerging economies' output growth over the "globalization years" of 1986-2004. Controlling for trade openness and two indicators of financial globalization, the authors find systematic positive and significant effects of...

This paper reviews the process of job creation and destruction across a sample of 16 industrial and emerging economies over the past decade. It exploits a harmonized firm-level data set drawn from business registers and enterprise census data. The paper assesses the importance of technological...

Less restrictive product market policies are crucial in promoting convergence to higher levels of GDP per capita. This paper benchmarks product market policies in Romania to those of OECD countries by estimating OECD indicators of Product Market Regulation (PMR). The PMR indicators allow a...

Trade does not stimulate growth in economies with excessive business and labor regulations. The authors examine the effect of openness on growth using cross-country regressions in both levels and changes. Results from the levels regressions imply that increased openness is associated with a...

Although both China and India are labor-abundant and dependant on manufactures, their export mixes are very different. Only one product-refined petroleum-appears in the top 25 products for both countries, and services exports are roughly twice as important for India as for China, which is much...

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...