Successful reductions in poverty, resulting from substantial increases in income and structural transformation, have been associated with growing levels of income inequality. This paper explores the link between structural transformation and inequality in Indonesia by applying Theil’s L...

This paper studies factors associated with firm participation in export markets, focusing primarily on firm size and access to credit, based on a survey sample comprising observations of 8,080 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) (with fewer than 100 employees) and non-SME firms in developing...

This study examines the relationship between firm characteristics and borrowing from commercial banks by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and five Southeast Asian economies (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Viet Nam). Analysis...

Urbanization usually occurs with structural transformation driven by a "push" from agricultural productivity growth and a "pull" from industrial productivity growth, and usually the former exceeds the latter. This paper presents a simple model to illustrate how the open policy in the People's...

This paper revisits the role of the manufacturing sector during the middle-income stage. By exploiting a large dataset that covers internationally comparable sectoral information, we prove that the manufacturing sector is imbued with three important characteristics. First, for middle-income...

The People's Republic of China (PRC) has been undergoing marvelous industrialization and manufacturing development in the past decades, which has promoted its fast economic growth and has reached a level of middle-income in recent years. It is widely accepted that the PRC's status as the...

The primary objective of this research is to identify key factors that explain the observed wide variation in patterns of inclusiveness of economic growth - defined here as gross domestic product (GDP) growth that leads to significant poverty reduction - in Asia. In exploring this relationship,...

The development path that the People's Republic of China (PRC) has been following during the past thirty years has led to both internal and external economic imbalances, and is now greatly challenged by the global crisis. This unbalanced growth path was primarily a result of the PRC's labor...

Although the overall economic performance of economies in South Asia in recent years has been impressive, there is concern that an aging and increasingly inadequate infrastructure may limit the potential for further growth and economic development. A critical infrastructure component is the...

Confronted by the current global economic crisis, Taipei, China's economy has suffered much like its neighbors. However, Taipei, China is different from other East Asia economies in several aspects. First, Taipei, China's industrial organization is dominated by small and medium-sized enterprises...