Economic growth in Chile since the mid 1980s has been remarkable for its high level and persistence. This paper attempts to shed light on the factors behind it and analyze the extent to which they can be sustained in the future. The first part of the paper presents some stylized facts. Taken...

Economic growth in Chile since the mid 1980s has been remarkable for its high level and persistence. This paper attempts to shed light on the factors behind it and analyze the extent to which they can be sustained in the future. The first part of the paper presents some stylized facts. Taken...

This paper studies economic growth in Malaysia, with the purpose of assessing the potential to attain the status and characteristics of a high-income country. Future economic growth is simulated under a business-as-usual baseline, where the growth drivers follow their historical or recent...

Recent empirical studies have examined the determinants of economic growth using country-average (cross-sectional) data. By contrast, this paper employs a technique for using a panel of cross-sectional and time series data for 98 countries over the 1960-85 period to determine the quantitative...

Although conventional wisdom suggests that reducing military spending may improve a country's economic growth performance, empirical studies have produced ambiguous results. This paper extends a standard growth model and obtains consistent panel data estimates of the growth retarding effects of...

This paper studies the apparent contradictions between two strands of the literature on the effects of financial intermediation on economic activity. On the one hand, the empirical growth literature finds a positive effect of financial depth as measured by, for instance, private domestic credit...

What major insights have emerged from development economics in the past decade, and how do they matter for the World Bank? This challenging question was recently posed by World Bank Group President David Malpass to the staff of the Development Research Group. This paper assembles a set of 13...

Adopting a legal definition of informality, this paper studies the causes of informality in general and with a particular application to Mexico. It starts with a discussion on the definition and measures of informality. It then argues and provides evidence that informality is not only a...

This study illustrates the mechanisms linking national saving and economic growth, with the purpose of understanding the possibilities and limits of a saving-based growth agenda in the context of the Egyptian economy. This is done through a simple theoretical model, calibrated to fit the...