The author provides sectoral evidence that sheds new light on the current debate regarding the sources of growth of the East Asian miracle. The author tests both the productivity-driven and endowment-driven hypotheses using Hong Kong's sectoral data. The results show that most of the growth in...

Empirical studies of the welfare consequences of quotas often assume perfect competition everywhere. If this assumption is not valid, welfare estimate and policy recommendations may err dramatically. The popular press often argues that market power is being exercised in markets constrained by...

What are the underlying rationales for industrial policy? Does empirical evidence support the use of industrial policy for correcting market failures that plague the process of industrialization? To address these questions, the authors provide a critical survey of the analytical literature on...

Do flexible labor markets lubricate growth? Using data from Taiwan, China, to analyze the effects of labor market flexibility, the authors find that: 1) Workers are more likely to move to industries that tend to be similar to their industry of origin (including intrasectoral moves that would be...

Many recent models have been developed to fit the basic facts on establishment and industry evolution. While these models yield a simple interpretation of the basic features of the data, they are too stylized to confront the micro-level data in a more formal quantitative analysis. In this paper,...

Fernandes explores Colombian trade policy from 1977-91, a period of substantial variation in protection across industries, to examine whether increased exposure to foreign competition generates plant-level productivity gains. Using a large panel of manufacturing plants, she finds a strong...

Business cycles are less volatile in rich countries than in poor ones. They are also more synchronized with the world cycle. The authors develop two alternative but noncompeting explanations for those facts. Both explanations proceed from the observation that the law of comparative advantage...

Productivity, and the Rybczynski effects of factor endowments, have been highlighted as the two main reasons behind the growth of newly industrializing economies in East Asia. However, empirical studies at the aggregate level, do not find support for these claims. Focusing on Singapore's...

A growth model with multiple industries is developed to study how industries evolve as capital accumulates endogenously when each industry exhibits Marshallian externality (increasing returns to scale) and to explain why industrial policies sometimes succeed but sometimes fail. The authors show...

This paper uses plant-level data to examine the impact of industrial and trade policy reforms on the geographic concentration of manufacturing industries in India from 1980 to 1999. First, the research shows that de-licensing and liberalization in foreign direct investment significantly reduced...