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...

The paper analyzes the impact of the recent global crisis in the context of the previous two decades' growth and capital flows. Growth decomposition exercises show that Egyptian growth is driven mostly by capital accumulation. To estimate the share of labor in national income, the analysis...

Although Kenya's financial system is by far the largest and most developed in East Africa and its stability has improved significantly over the past years, many challenges remain. This paper assesses the stability, efficiency, and outreach of Kenya's banking system, using aggregate, bank-level,...

Can the clothing sector be a driver of export diversification and growth for today's low-income countries as it was in the past for countries that have graduated into middle income? This paper assesses this issue taking into account key changes to the market for clothing: the emergence of India...

This paper examines recent changes in the structure of Argentine exports and the implications for future growth. The authors find that the current export structure of Argentina is not conducive to future growth because it is dominated by low-productivity goods that tend to be exported by...

Madagascar's textile and apparel industry has been among the fastest growing in Sub-Saharan Africa. Fueled by low labor costs, a fairly productive labor force, and preferential access to industrial countries, Madagascar's exports of textile and apparel products grew from about US $45 million in...

This paper examines systematically the growth effects of trade integration in Sub-Saharan Africa. It complements and improves upon the empirical literature in two aspects: first, it jointly estimates the impact of different dimensions of trade integration, namely, trade volumes, export/trade...

This paper uses the dramatic expansion of access to the Internet in China to analyze the impact of the Internet on firm performance. The paper combines firm-level production data with province-level information on Internet penetration to examine how the rollout of the Internet across Chinese...

Interest in assessing the impacts on developing countries of changes in major markets' economic performance has risen in tandem with global economic uncertainty over short- and medium-term growth prospects. This paper proposes a methodology to measure the vulnerability of a country's exports to...

Like many emerging economies, South Africa has identified exports as an engine for more inclusive, job-intensive growth. However, employment growth did not follow the substantial export growth that South Africa experienced in the 2000s. This paper uses a newly developed World Bank database --...