The 2009 global recession demonstrated, once again, the importance of crisis prevention as well as the critical need for preserving policy room so that emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) can act when their economies are hit by shocks. And now, with the global growth outlook still...

Although emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) weathered the global recession a decade ago relatively well, they now appear less well placed to cope with the substantial downside risks facing the global economy. In many EMDEs, the room for monetary and fiscal policies to respond to...

The paper introduces a Bayesian cross-entropy forecast (BCEF) procedure to assess the variance and skewness in density forecasting. The methodology decomposes the variance and skewness of the predictive distribution accounting for the shares of selected risk factors. The method assigns...

This paper reviews the evidence on the importance of human capital for macro-economic development. Through the lens of a simple aggregate production function, human capital might increase output per capita by directly entering in the production process, incentivising the accumulation of...

To analyze the effect of an increase in the quantity or quality of public investment on growth, this paper extends the World Bank?s Long-Term Growth Model (LTGM), by separating the total capital stock into public and private portions, with the former adjusted for its quality. The paper presents...

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...

This survey reviews the current state of the economic literature, assessing the impact of transport policies on growth, inclusion, and sustainability in a developing country context. The findings are summarized and methodologies are critically assessed, especially those dealing with endogeneity...

This paper analyzes the Republic of Korea's rapid and sustained growth experience for the past six decades from the perspective of the neoclassical growth model (the workhorse model of the World Bank?s Long Term Growth Model (LTGM) project). Overall, the sources of Korea's growth were balanced...

There are currently 31 countries classified as low income, less than half the number in 2001. Rapid growth in low-income countries from 2001 to 2018 allowed many to progress to middle-income status, supported by the commodity price boom of 2001-11, debt relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor...

This paper studies future poverty, inequality, and shared prosperity outcomes using a panel data set with 150 countries over 1980-2014. The findings suggest that global extreme poverty will decrease in absolute and relative terms in the period 2015-2030. However, absolute poverty is likely to...