For several decades, the international community has aspired to integrate the social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainability. Yet, no country has achieved the patterns of consumption and production that could sustain global prosperity in the coming decades. Thus, with the...

This paper explores the effect of globalization on social cohesion outcomes and reviews its underlying mechanisms. I offer a framework to review the literature, in which I identify worker labour earnings, household expenditures and firm productivity as main channels through which globalization...

More than 170 years ago, Frédéric Bastiat noted in his masterly work Economic Sophisms that the “opposition to free trade rests upon errors, or, if you prefer, upon half-truths.”1 Ever since Adam Smith successfully replaced mercantilist orthodoxy with free trade doctrine in his celebrated...

Economists around the world rely in addition to official statistics on business (and consumer) surveys, which are more up-to-date. However, for many emerging and developing countries there is a lack of such surveys. This gap can, at least partly, be filled by the Ifo World Economic Survey (WES)....

Scientific productivity of middle income countries correlates stronger with present and future wealth than indices reflecting its financial, social, economic or technological sophistication. We identify the contribution of the relative productivity of different scientific disciplines in...

This paper develops new error assessment methods to evaluate the performance of debt sustainability analyses (DSAs) for low-income countries (LICs) from 2005-2015. We find some evidence of a bias towards optimism for public and external debt projections, which was most appreciable for LICs with...

This study identifies the most binding constraints to trade expansion faced by developing countries and estimate their severity for trade and economic growth. This process is crucial to prioritize trade reforms and to guide aid-for-trade resource allocations. The core of the analysis is a...

This study explores the contribution of the deepening of existing products (intensive margin), the emergence of new products (extensive margin), and the demise of existing products (failure margin) to the export expansion of developing Asian countries in 1990-2017. Using data based on the...