Is rapid economic growth experienced by the East African Community during the past decade built on solid foundations? To gain some clues, we use a variety of newly-collected and existing data sources to analyze the structural transformation of output and exports, as well as indicators of their...

Thailand stands out in international comparison as a country with a high dispersion of productivity across sectors. It has especially low labor productivity in agriculture—a sector that employs a much larger share of the population than is typical for a country at Thailand’s level of income....

Total factor productivity growth was stagnant or slowing in many advanced countries even prior to the crisis. This paper documents sector-level productivity patterns across advanced economies prior to the crisis and examines the role of product and labor market rigidities as well as innovation...

This paper attempts to enhance empirical understanding of the effects of structural-change variables on economic outcomes. The relationships between sectoral shares and (1) the speed of structural change and (2) economic growth were examined for a large panel of 111 economies over the period of...

Services-led development strategies have raised concerns based on the historically low productivity growth of services. In this paper, I investigate which conditions make these strategies successful by looking at the most prominent example, India. I show that (i) the fastest growing industries...

This paper studies structural change in production networks for intermediate inputs (input-output network) and new capital (investment network). For each network, we document a declining fraction of production by goods sectors and a rising fraction of production by services sectors. We develop a...

The celebratory tone about the emergence of the BRICs and the improved growth in Sub Saharan Africa and Latin America during the 2000s obscures the reality that, for large parts of the developing world, the challenges of development are more acute than ever before. After three decades of...