This paper offers a retrospective view of the key pillar of Solow's neoclassical growth model, namely the aggregate production function. We review how this tool came to life and how it has survived until today, despite three criticisms that undermined its raison d'être. They are the Cambridge...

From 1962 to 2013, the People's Republic of China's (PRC's)agricultural employment share declined from 82% to 31%. The transfer of workers out of low-productivity agriculture is a fundamental pillar of the PRC's aspirations to progress and eventually become a high-income economy. We hypothesize...

We estimate the People's Republic of China's (PRC's potential growth rate in 2012 at 8.7% and at 9.2% for the average of 2008-2012, about the same as the average actual growth rate for this period. This rate is the natural growth rate, that is, the rate consistent with a constant unemployment...

This paper asks, first, whether today's developing economies can achieve high-income status without first building large manufacturing sectors. We find that practically every economy that enjoys a high income today experienced a manufacturing employment share in excess of 18%-20% sometime since...

During the last few years, the newly coined term middle-income trap has been widely used by policymakers to refer to the middle-income economies that seem to be stuck in the middle-income range. However, there is no accepted definition of the term in the literature. In this paper, we study...

The literature on the finance-growth nexus highlights the importance of the financial cycle for the estimation of potential output of an economy. We estimate potential output growth for the G-5 countries, as well as for 10 high- and middle-income Asian economies, using a multivariate model that...

We show that Autor and Salomons' (2017, 2018) analysis of the impact of technical progress on employment growth is problematic. When they use labor productivity growth as a proxy for technical progress, their regressions are quasi-accounting identities that omit one variable of the identity....

We use the information compiled as of 15 June 2020 by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in the ADB COVID-19 Policy Database to analyze the measures taken by its 68 members, plus the European Central Bank, and the European Union, to combat the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. Measures...

The severe economic downturn caused by the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has forced governments worldwide to increase spending while tax revenues simultaneously collapsed. Concurrent with this, central banks in several of these countries are financing a significant percent of their...

We provide the first evidence that low- and middle-income countries with high education levels were more successful in developing comparative advantage in products unrelated to those they already export. In contrast, controlling for the relatedness of target products to these countries' exports,...