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...

Global potential output growth has been flagging. At 2.5 percent in 2013-17, post-crisis potential growth is 0.5 percentage point below its longer-term average and 0.9 percentage point below its average a decade ago. Compared with a decade ago, potential growth has declined 0.8 percentage point...

This paper documents the sources of the Republic of Korea's economic growth, as well as the associated productivity growth and efficiency dynamics during its process of structural transformation from 1970 to 2016. The analysis includes land as a separate production factor to sort out the...

What is the efficiency cost of rent-seeking activities in Argentina? This paper quantitatively shows that rent-seeking activities in the form of bribes have aggregate effects through two channels. First, they generate misallocation of resources across firms because they prevent resources from...

China's economy grew by an impressive 10 percent per year over four decades. Productivity improvements within sectors and gains from resource reallocation between sectors and ownership groups drove that expansion. However, productivity growth has declined markedly in recent years. This paper...

This paper reviews resource sector developments in 12 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa that made their first (major) petroleum discoveries during the most recent commodity boom. The analysis, which goes back to 2001, looks at sector forecasts of international organizations, governments, and...

Labor productivity in EMDEs is just under one-fifth of the advanced economy average, while in LICs, it is just 2 percent. Average productivity growth in EMDEs has picked up rapidly since 2000, renewing interest in the convergence hypothesis, which predicts that economies with low productivity...

This paper documents that structural change positively contributed to labor productivity growth in Guinea during 2006-15. However, the contribution of structural change to productivity growth was modest (about one percentage point per year on average), because labor moved from agriculture, the...

This study aims to provide a quantitative and integrated analysis of long-term structural transformation and labor productivity growth in Malaysia. Using data from the Department of Statistics Malaysia from 1987 to 2018 and decompositions that take account of the static and dynamic efficiency...