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...

This paper presents evidence suggesting that the relationship between income and economic structure is shifting over time, with countries across the income distribution uniformly increasing the share of labor in service sectors and an increasingly less stark relationship between manufacturing...

Empirical evidence indicates that in many developing regions, the extreme poor in more marginal land areas form a "residual" pool of rural labor. Structural transformation in such developing economies depends crucially on labor and land use decisions of these most-vulnerable populations located...

Ethiopia has achieved sustained high growth for more than a decade. At the same time, the country has been facing several economic challenges, including falling exports, chronic foreign currency shortages, as well as a slow pace of structural transformation. In recent years, the already...

Drawing on international trade data, this paper uses the product space approach to analyze changes in Morocco?s goods exports in 1990?2010 and future export priorities. The level of Morocco?s gross domestic product and its moderate growth match the predictions of product space analysis, informed...

One of the most striking features of economic growth is the process of structural change whereby the share of agriculture in GDP decreases as countries develop. The cross-country growth literature typically estimates an aggregate homogeneous production function or convergence regression model...

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 develops a dynamic general equilibrium model to explore industrial evolution and economic growth in a closed developing economy. The authors show that industries will endogenously upgrade toward the more capital-intensive ones as the capital endowment becomes more abundant. The model...

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...

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...