The North Korean economy has been a statistical black hole for decades but is undergoing substantial transformations. Rapid post-war industrialisation was not sustained beyond the mid-1960s and South Korea’s economy far outpaced North Korea’s during the next three decades, during which trend...

Global financial integration has been associated with divergent patterns of real convergence and the current account in emerging markets. While countries in emerging Asia have been running sizeable current account surpluses, countries in emerging Europe have been facing large current account...

Using a new survey, we show that the dispersion of marginal products across firms in the European Union is about twice as large as that in the United States. Reducing it to the US level would increase EU GDP by more than 30 percent. Alternatively, removing barriers between industries and...

This paper analyses real income convergence in central, eastern and south-eastern Europe (CESEE) to the most advanced EU economies between 2000 and 2016. The relevance of this topic stems both from the far-reaching implications of real income convergence for economic welfare and the importance...

This paper takes stock of the main structural reforms that Greece has undertaken since 2010, those currently proposed and that are in the process of implementation, and quantifies the medium and long‑term effects on output. Special attention is given to three issues that are relevant to...

In the euro area, there is mixed evidence that the GDP per capita of lower-income economies has been catching up with that of higher-income economies since the start of monetary union. The significant real convergence performance of some of the most recent members contrasts with that of the...

Using the results of the Survey on the Access to Finance of Enterprises (2009 to 2020 editions), this paper aims to assess the effect of Covid-19 pandemic on the probabilities of firm to innovate and grow and to compare their likelihood with that of the previous downturn. To control for a...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the interplay between structural change, interpreted as the secular process of sectoral transformation, and labour productivity growth in the EU in several new dimensions. First, based on the latest data, we document the size of the negative effect that...

While China’s overall debt-to-GDP ratio is not particularly high, its non-financial corporate debt relative to GDP is higher than in other major economies. State-owned enterprises account for over three quarters of that debt with a size exceeding GDP. This paper provides insights into the size...