Low and highly volatile growth define Africa's growth experience. But there is no evidence that growth volatility is associated to long term economic performance. This result may be misleading if it suggests that volatility is not important for economic and social progress. In this paper we use...

What has the profession learned from cross-country regressions about the links between long-run growth and indicators of fiscal, monetary, trade, financial, and exchange-rate policies? The authors find that: indicators of financial development are strongly associated with long-run growth; other...

Regional inequalities represent a continuing development challenge in most countries, especially those with large geographic areas. Globalization heightens these challenges because it places a premium on skills: since rich regions typically also have better educated and better skilled labor, the...

In research on how population growth affects economic performance, some researchers stress that population growth reduces the natural resources and capital (physical and human) per worker while other researchers stress how greater population size and density affect productivity. Despite these...

The magnitude and persistence of growth in gross domestic product are topics of intense scrutiny by economists. Although the existing techniques provide a range of tools to study the nature of growth and volatility time series, these usually come with shortcomings, including the need to...

The need for economic diversification receives a great deal of attention in Russia. This paper looks at a way to improve it that is essential but largely ignored: how to help diversifying firms better survive economic cycles. By definition, economic diversification means doing new things in new...

Growth is pro-poor if the poverty measure of interest falls. According to this definition there are three potential sources of pro-poor growth: (1) a high rate of growth of average incomes; (2) a high sensitivity of poverty to growth in average incomes; and (3) a poverty-reducing pattern of...

Recent literature suggests that long-run averages of growth and inflation are only weakly correlated and that such correlation is not robust to the exclusion of observations of extreme inflation. Including time series panel data has improved matters, but an aggregate parametric approach remains...

This paper complements the cross-country approach by examining the correlates of growth acceleration in per capita gross domestic product around"significant"public expenditure episodes by reorganizing the data around turning points, or events. The authors define a growth event as an increase in...

The"stylized fact"that distribution must get worse with economic growth in poor countries before it can get better turns out not to be a fact at all. Growth's effects on inequality can go either way and are contingent on several other factors. The authors found no sign in the new cross-country...