The world is currently still struggling with the aftermath of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Following a description of the eruption, evolution and consequences of the global crisis, this paper reviews alternative hypotheses for the causes of the global financial crisis as...

As the world recovers only slowly from the 2008 financial crisis and Europe is facing a looming debt crisis, concerns have increased that the "new normal" -- a period of high unemployment, low returns on investment, high risks, and low growth -- may become protracted in advanced economies. If...

Modern economic development is accompanied by the structural transformation from an agrarian to an industrial economy and occurs through a process of continuous industrial and technological upgrading. Since the 18th century, all countries that industrialized successfully in Europe, North America...

Economic development is a process of continuous industrial and technological upgrading in which any country, regardless of its level of development, can succeed if it develops industries that are consistent with its comparative advantage, determined by its endowment structure. The secret winning...

This paper applies the Growth Identification and Facilitation Framework developed by Lin and Monga (2010) to Nigeria. It identifies as appropriate comparator countries China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam, and selects a wide range of industries in which these comparator countries may be losing...

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...

Active economic policies by developing countries governments to promote growth and industrialization have generally been viewed with suspicion by economists, and for good reasons: past experiences show that such policies have too often failed to achieve their stated objectives. But the...

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...

The financial crisis arose in the industrial countries, but has affected developing countries through higher interest rates, sharp changes in commodity prices, and reductions in investment, trade, migration and remittances. For most low-income countries, shocks that affect food prices or wage...

The authors develop an endogenous growth model that combines structural change with repeated product improvement. That is, the technologies in one sector of the model become not only increasingly capital-intensive, but also progressively productive over time. Application of the basic model to...