The authorexamines a range of cross-sectional variation in performance and policies for evidence on what distinguishes successes from failures. At about 6 percent, the growth rate of the Four Tigers - Hong Kong, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan (China) - are among the largest...

Remarkably diverse indicators show quality of life across nations to be positively associated with per capita income. But changes in quality of life as income grows are surprisingly uneven. Moreover, in either level or changes, the effect of exogenous shifts over time is surprisingly strong. It...

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...

Recent literature suggests that long-run averages of growth and inflation are only weakly correlated and that such correlation is not robust to the exclusion of observations of extreme inflation. Including time series panel data has improved matters, but an aggregate parametric approach remains...

Fiscal adjustment is an illusion when it lowers the budget deficit or public debt but leaves the government's net worth unchanged, says the author. Conventional measures of the budget deficit largely measure the change in explicit public sector liabilities (debt). A more appropriate measure of...

The authors systematically document remarkably high degrees of concentration in manufacturing exports for a sample of 151 countries over a range of 3,000 products. For every country manufacturing exports are dominated by a few"big hits"which account for most of the export value and where...

Analysis of decade-long growth rates in all countries shows a striking regularity: episodes of rapid growth are limited largely to a middle range of initial income; neither very poor nor very rich countries experienced rapid growth. Episodes of negative growth are limited to low and middle-income...

There is widespread consensus among economists that high inflation is often caused by the government's need to raise seignorage to finance high budget deficits. Depending on the shape of the money demand function, steady-state seignorage may follow a Laffer curve, where seignorage first rises...

The author presents a simple endogenous growth model (with two types of capital) that shows the sizable long-run effects on growth of distortionary policies. The model applies to many different types of distortions of relative prices common in developing countries - for example, price controls,...

After years of poor economic performance, many Latin American countries undertook ambitious programs of macroeconomic stabilization andstructural reform in recent years. This change in policy created high expectations for the region, and some observers have questioned whether actual growth...