This paper reviews the evolving literature that links financial development, financial crises, and economic growth in the past 20 years. The initial disconnect--with one literature focusing on the effect of financial deepening on long-run growth and another studying its impact on volatility and...

This paper contributes to explain the cross-country heterogeneity of the poverty response to changes in economic growth. It does so by focusing on the structure of output growth. The paper presents a two-sector theoretical model that clarifies the mechanism through which the sectoral composition...

Hnatkovska and Loayza study the empirical, cross-country relationship between macroeconomic volatility and long-run economic growth. They address four central questions:- Does the volatility-growth link depend on country and policy characteristics, such as the level of development or trade...

Empirical results suggest that lower military spending in the late 1980s - plus further cuts in military spending should global peace be secured - could produce a substantial long-term peace dividend in higher capacity output.Conventional wisdom suggests that reducing military spending may...

The response of economic growth to reforms in Latin America has not been disappointing. Because of those policy changes, and despite a global slowdown, Latin America did well to return to its historic growth rate of 2 percent per capita in 1990-93. After years of poor macroeconomic performance,...

This paper reviews the evolving literature that links financial development, financial crises, and economic growth in the past 20 years. The initial disconnect—with one literature focusing on the effect of financial deepening on long-run growth and another studying its impact on volatility and...

The reallocation of resources from low- to high-productivity firms can generate large aggregate productivity gains. The paper uses data from the Malaysian manufacturing census to measure the country's hypothetical productivity gains when moving toward the level of within-sector allocative...

One of the most important lessons in economics is that productivity is key to economic growth. Productivity is defined in economic theory as the ratio of output over input. Productivity is mainly driven by four components: innovation, including the creation of new technologies: education to...

This is the background paper for the productivity extension of the World Bank's Long-Term Growth Model (LTGM). Based on an extensive literature review, the paper identifies the main determinants of economic productivity as innovation, education, market efficiency, infrastructure, and...