This paper reviews the determinants of Latin America's uneven growth based on an accounting decomposition that breaks down countries' growth (relative to the world) into three trade-related channels: (i) an export pull measuring the traction exerted by the country's exports, (ii) an external...

Women's economic empowerment is not a new issue; nevertheless, it continues to challenge governments and development assistance agencies. One of the reasons for this hurdle may well be that gender advocates and growth devotees are speaking different languages when there is a huge space for them...

This is the background paper for the productivity extension of the World Bank's Long-Term Growth Model (LTGM). Based on an extensive literature review, the paper identifies the main determinants of economic productivity as innovation, education, market efficiency, infrastructure, and...

How do high-growth firms affect the rest of the economy? This paper explores this question using Hungarian administrative microdata. It finds evidence of stronger productivity growth for firms supplying and operating in industries with more high-growth firms. The surge of high-growth firms'...

Ghana has experienced a decade of solid and exceptionally high growth. Between 2005 and 2015, income nearly doubled. This paper analyzes the factors driving this impressive growth performance, using tools such as structural change decompositions and growth regressions. For the comparative...

Estimates of total factor productivity growth, a measure of increases in the efficiency of production, have traditionally been based on a two-factor model of labor and fixed capital. Because profits are measured residually in the System of National Accounts, they implicitly include rents on...

This paper examines productivity growth in Romania using balance sheet data for a census of Romanian firms in 2011-17. Three measures of productivity are estimated: labor productivity, revenue total factor productivity, and revenue total factor productivity adjusted for markups. Drawing from...

The effect of structural reforms on growth in Europe and Central Asia is assessed by looking separately at each supply-side channel: capital, labor, and productivity, with the last estimated using the stochastic frontier approach. By controlling for the interaction with the economic cycle, the...

This paper studies economic growth in Malaysia, with the purpose of assessing the potential to attain the status and characteristics of a high-income country. Future economic growth is simulated under a business-as-usual baseline, where the growth drivers follow their historical or recent...

What major insights have emerged from development economics in the past decade, and how do they matter for the World Bank? This challenging question was recently posed by World Bank Group President David Malpass to the staff of the Development Research Group. This paper assembles a set of 13...