Africa's economic performance has been widely viewed with pessimism. In this paper, firm-level data for around 80 countries are used to examine formal firm performance. Without controls, manufacturing African firms perform significantly worse than firms in other regions. They have lower...

China's two main economic problems before reform were low incentives to workers and the misallocation of resources among sectors. These problems were theresult of a development strategy oriented toward heavy industry. By improving material incentives, China's reforms created a flow of new...

China's government economic stimulus package in 2008-09 appears to have worked well. It seems to have been about the right size, included a number of appropriate components, and was well timed. Its subnational component was designed to maximize the impact of the stimulus package on the economy...

This paper discusses the causes of the middle-income trap in Latin America and the Caribbean, identifies the challenges and opportunities for Latin America that come from China's rise, and draws lessons from New Structural Economics and the Growth Identification and Facilitation Framework to...

This paper applies the Growth Identification and Facilitation Framework developed by Lin and Monga (2010) to Nigeria. It identifies as appropriate comparator countries China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam, and selects a wide range of industries in which these comparator countries may be losing...

Despite its heavy human, financial, and economic cost, the recent global recession provides a unique opportunity to reflect on the knowledge from several decades of growth research, draw policy lessons from the experience of successful countries, and explore new approaches going forward. In an...

The authors develop an endogenous growth model that combines structural change with repeated product improvement. That is, the technologies in one sector of the model become not only increasingly capital-intensive, but also progressively productive over time. Application of the basic model to...

As the world recovers only slowly from the 2008 financial crisis and Europe is facing a looming debt crisis, concerns have increased that the"new normal"-- a period of high unemployment, low returns on investment, high risks, and low growth -- may become protracted in advanced economies. If...

The simmering sovereign debt crisis in the Euro Zone represents a looming threat to the recovery of the world economy and could lead to a renewed global financial crisis. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the root causes of the crisis in Europe and assess the extent to which it was driven...