This study investigates the impact of World Bank development policy lending on the quality of economic policy. It finds that the quality of policy increases, but at a diminishing rate, with the cumulative number of policy loans. Similar results hold for the cumulative number of conditions...

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...

Active economic policies by developing countries? governments to promote growth and industrialization have generally been viewed with suspicion by economists, and for good reasons: past experiences show that such policies have too often failed to achieve their stated objectives. But the...

This paper reviews the literature relevant to understanding political constraints to economic reforms. Reform refers to changes in government policies or institutional rules because status quo policies and institutions are not working well to achieve the goals of economic well-being and...

Economic development is a process of continuous industrial and technological upgrading in which any country, regardless of its level of development, can succeed if it develops industries that are consistent with its comparative advantage, determined by its endowment structure. The secret winning...

This paper assesses the effects of selected structural reforms on labor productivity growth for 37 developing countries over 2006-14. It combines newly constructed reform indexes using the International Monetary Fund's Monitoring of Fund Arrangements data set and firm-level productivity from the...

Developing countries made considerable gains during the first decade of the 21st century. Their economies grew at unprecedented rates, resulting in large reduction in extreme poverty and a significant expansion of the middle class. But more recently that progress has slowed with an economic...

Economic development critically involves diversification and structural transformation?that is, the continued, dynamic reallocation of resources from less productive to more productive sectors and activities. This paper documents that, over an extended period, developing Asia has on average been...

This paper explores how the ongoing crisis, the policy responses to it, and the post-crisis global economy will impact China's medium-term prospects for growth, poverty reduction, and development. The paper reviews China's pre-crisis growth experience, including its relationship to global...

Cambodia's growth over 1998-2008 has been remarkable (almost 10 percent per annum for a decade). This paper applies a "growth diagnostic" approach to understand how this happened and how it can be sustained. Past growth has been driven by the coincidence of a set of historical and geographic...