This paper revisits the effects of a country's institutional framework on individual firms' behavior, in particular focusing on their propensity to comply with legal rules. The theoretical model presented here suggests that these effects may be of paramount significance-contrary to the recently...

This is a comparative study on the historical experience of real effective exchange rate (REER) misalignment of Japanese yen, Deutsche mark, Singapore dollar and Taiwan dollar, with regard to the recent dispute over the Renminbi (RMB) valuation. Panel-based misalignment estimates of the four...

This paper examines the growth experience of the Central Asian economies after the breakup of the Soviet Union. In particular, it evaluates the impact of being landlocked and resource rich. The main conclusions are: (1) Over the period 1994-2006, the landlocked resourcescarce developing...

This paper identifies factors associated with takeoff - a sustained period of high growth following a period of stagnation. We examine a panel of 241 stagnation episodes" from 146 countries, 54 % of these episodes are followed by takeoffs. Countries that experience takeoffs average 2.3% annual...

Becoming a rich country requires the ability to produce and export commodities that embody certain characteristics. We classify 779 exported commodities according to two dimensions: (1) sophistication (measured by the income content of the products exported); and (2) connectivity to other...

We develop an Index of Opportunities for 130 countries based on their capabilities to undergo structural transformation. The Index of Opportunities has four dimensions, all of them characteristic of a country's export basket: (1) sophistication; (2) diversification; (3) standardness; and (4)...

The global crisis of 2007-09 affected developing Asia largely through a decline in exports to the developed countries and a slowdown in remittances. This happened very quickly, and by 2009 there were already signs of recovery (except on the employment front). This recovery was led by China's...

Research on economic growth suggests that the era of colonization has had an impact on the levels of economic development of countries around the globe. However, why some countries were colonized early, some late, and others not at all, and what effect these differences have had on current...

We examine the differential impact of portfolio debt, portfolio equity, and FDI inflows on 37 manufacturing industries, 99 countries, 1991-2007, extending Rajan-Zingales (1998). We utilize external finance dependence measures in a series of cross-sectional regressions of manufacturing...

Using cross country regressions, this paper constructs a novel distance-to-frontier metric for tracking broad socio-economic inequality (including access of the poor to health infrastructure) over time for individual countries. Given the unavailability of reliable and consistent direct measures...