The authors study the empirical, cross-country relationship between macroeconomic volatility and long-run economic growth. They address four central questions: 1) Does the volatility-growth link depend on country and policy characteristics, such as the level of development or trade openness? 2)...

The rapid growth of exports since the early 1990s is a central feature in the extraordinary rise of Peru's economy in recent years. This study puts a lens on this export growth episode, with special attention to two issues. The first one is the role of international price levels as well as...

The need for economic diversification receives a great deal of attention in Russia. This paper looks at a way to improve it that is essential but largely ignored: how to help diversifying firms better survive economic cycles. By definition, economic diversification means doing new things in new...

The author estimates the effects on growth of commodity price shocks, and uncertainty within an established empirical growth model. Ex-post shocks, and ex-ante uncertainty have been treated in the empirical literature as if they were synonymous. But they are distinct concepts, and it is both...

Recent research highlights the relationship between economic development and productive diversification, which may be hindered by market failures. After identifying stages of diversification in disaggregated export data, the authors develop a metric for the flows of export"discoveries,"or...

To what extent has Sub-Saharan Africa's slow economic growth over the past five decades been due to price and trade policies that discouraged production of agricultural relative to non-agricultural tradables? This paper uses a new set of estimates of policy induced distortions to relative...

Two otherwise identical firms that enter the same market in different months, one in January and one in December, will report dramatically different annual sales for the first calendar year of operations. This partial year effect in annual data leads to downward biased observations of the level...

In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the link from growth to jobs was tenuous in the first decade of the transition, giving rise to the notion of jobless growth. Yet, European countries suffered large job losses during the recent recession, suggesting that jobs and growth are closely entwined....

This paper addresses the mechanisms by which trade openness affects growth volatility. Using a diverse set of export diversification indicators, it presents strong evidence pointing to an important role for export diversification in reducing the effect of trade openness on growth volatility. The...

There has been a growing interest in what have come to be termed"multidimensional indices of poverty."Advocates for these new indices correctly point out that command over market goods is not all that matters to peoples'well-being, and that other factors need to be considered when quantifying...