Despite its heavy human, financial, and economic cost, the recent global recession provides a unique opportunity to reflect on the knowledge from several decades of growth research, draw policy lessons from the experience of successful countries, and explore new approaches going forward. In an...

They are being hailed as the new Holy Grail of economic development. The success of special economic zones (SEZ) in general and specialized ones in particular (industrial and technology parks) in countries as diverse as Australia, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, Japan, the United...

After long suffering from benign neglect if not outright contempt, industrial policy is almost fashionable again. The global financial and economic crisis known as the Great Recession has forced researchers and policy makers to confront the reality that market forces alone generally do not lead...

This paper assesses some of the main strands of the theoretical literature on unemployment and employment and shows that their interesting conclusions may not be transferable to low-income countries whose endowment and production structures are profoundly different from that of high-income...

This essay is about an important area in which there has been major rethinking -- industrial policy, by which the authors mean government policies directed at affecting the economic structure of the economy. The standard argument was that markets were efficient, so there was no need for...

In times of crises, it is always useful to revisit some of the paradigms that underlie collective thinking and action. For nearly 200 years, most social science has relied on the assumption that the emergence of strong and nurturing social capital through a vibrant civil society yields all kind...

Traditional narratives of external imbalances have focused on the analysis of national accounts, trade flows, and financial flows. They have generated two opposing views of the current situation of the world economy: on one side, a prudent, if not pessimistic view considers large imbalances as...

This paper analyzes the dynamics of poverty and income inequality during the recovery phase of the transition that characterized the Republic of Latvia in the late 1990s. Despite a continued rise in income inequality, empirical evidence suggests an improvement in living standards, owing largely...

Latvia's experience over the past decade shows that economic growth and real convergence can no longer be assumedto be exogenously driven processes determined by given technological improvements and relatively higher factor returns. Instead, it is an endogenously driven process led by many...

For decades, many researchers argued that economics had nothing to fear from enriching itself with lessons and advances from other disciplines. Unfortunately, these suggestions were either neglected or dismissed upfront in what was then arbitrarily considered mainstream economics. The global...