For a representative sample of manufacturing firms in 26 countries, this paper shows that changes in the cost of importing over time are significantly and negatively correlated with changes in the percentage of firms'material inputs that are of foreign origin. Furthermore, the paper shows that...

How can countries stimulate and sustain strong export growth? To answer this question, the authors examine 92 episodes of export surges, defined as significant increases in manufacturing export growth that are sustained for at least seven years. They find that export surges in developing...

Modern economic development is accompanied by the structural transformation from an agrarian to an industrial economy and occurs through a process of continuous industrial and technological upgrading. Since the 18th century, all countries that industrialized successfully in Europe, North America...

The paper contains a framework for linking social protection with growth and productivity, an updated review of the literature, new original work filling in gaps in the available evidence, and a discussion of operational implications. The paper demonstrates that there was a shift in the...

This paper examines how financial expansion and contraction cycles affect the broader economy through their impact on eight real economic sectors in a panel of 28 countries over 1960-2005, paying particular attention to large, or sharp, contractions and magnifying and mitigating factors....

Not only do Africa's fragile states grow more slowly than non-fragile states, but they seem to be caught in a"fragility trap". For instance, the probability that a fragile state in 2001 was still fragile in 2009 was 0.95. This paper presents an economic model where three features -- political...

This paper reviews the empirical evidence on the existence of poverty traps, understood as self-reinforcing mechanisms through which poor individuals or countries remain poor. Poverty traps have captured the interest of many development policy makers, because poverty traps provide a...

This paper analyzes the drivers and consequences of sudden stops of capital flows. It focuses on the impact of external vulnerability on the depth and length of sudden stop crises. The authors analyze 43 developing and developed countries between 1993 and 2006. They find evidence that external...

The financial crisis has re-ignited the fierce debate about the merits of financial globalization and its implications for growth, especially for developing countries. The empirical literature has not been able to conclusively establish the presumed growth benefits of financial integration....

This paper proposes a parametric approach to estimating a dynamic binary response panel data model that allows for endogenous contemporaneous regressors. This approach is of particular value for settings in which one wants to estimate the effects of an endogenous treatment on a binary outcome....