Maintaining rapid economic growth depends increasingly on productivity gains, particularly in the service sector. Competition has an important role to play in achieving such gains. However, Korea’s development strategy has tended to weaken competition and has left a legacy of government...

In 2018, exports of fuel and energy commodities increased by nearly 36%t as compared to the previous year, while growth in non-oil and gas exports amounted to over 11%. However, it was mainly facilitated by improvement of the pricing situation on the market. Within a year, imports rose by 5%...

East Asia is the world's main natural gas importing region, in which China became the world's largest gas importer in 2018. However, China's natural gas imports are subject to a high premium level, which increases the gas import cost and negatively impacts China's energy structure transformation...

We provide empirical investigations into the nexus between bank market power economic growth using nationalized bank data from 44 African countries from 2002 to 2015. The paper also explores how institutional quality factors influence the mechanisms through which banks with market power...

This paper examines whether Asian banks are still prone to moral hazard in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian crisis. Using a sample of commercial banks from 12 Asian countries during the 2001-2007 period,our empirical findings highlight that greater market power in the banking market results in...

This paper examines the effect of wealth concentration on firms' market power when firm entry is driven by entrepreneurs facing uninsurable idiosyncratic risks. Under greater wealth concentration, households in the lower end of the wealth distribution are more risk averse and less willing (or...

We show empirical evidence that there may not be a tradeoff between market income inequality and high sustained growth, which is key for poverty alleviation. We argue that the economies that achieved high sustained growth and low market income inequality are characterized by dynamism-a drive...