Japan faces significant challenges in encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship. Attempts to formally model past industrial policy interventions uniformly uncover little, if any, positive impact on productivity, growth, or welfare. The evidence indicates that most resource flows went to large,...

South Korea's experience is unparalleled in its combination of sustained prosperity, capital controls, and financial crisis. Over several decades, South Korea experienced rapid sustained growth in the presence of capital controls. These controls and the de-linking of domestic and international...

Chronic food shortages, political repression, and poverty have driven tens of thousands of North Koreans into China. This paper reports results from a large-scale survey of this refugee population. The survey provides insight not only into the material circumstances of the refugees but also into...

Arab political regimes are both unusually undemocratic and unusually stable. A series of nested statistical models are reported to parse competing explanations. The democratic deficit is comprehensible in terms of lack of modernization, British colonial history, neighborhood effects, reliance on...

For most of the last three decades, economic growth in the Philippines lagged its Asian neighbors, earning it such sobriquets as "the Sick Man of Asia" and "the Latin American of Asia." During the Asian financial crisis however, the sick man proved more resilient than his neighbors. This was not...

This study finds that North Korea's nuclear test and the imposition of UN Security Council sanctions have had no perceptible effect on North Korea's trade with its two largest partners, China and South Korea. Before North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test, it was widely believed that...

Countries blessed with abundant natural resources often seek financial and political power from their supposedly lucky status. But the potentially negative impact of natural resources on development of poor countries is captured in the phrase "the resource curse." Instead of success and...

Myanmar is in the midst of a long and difficult multifaceted transition, involving political liberalization, economic reform, and the resolution of multiple long-standing civil conflicts. The country has a history of ethno-religious conflict and separatism. Civil-military relations are muddy,...

In recent years, South Korea has been a major investor in North Korea, and South Korean firms have employed more than 50,000 North Korean workers. The hope has been to use economic engagement to lessen the North's direct state control over the economy and to encourage greater internal opening....

The maturing of the manufacturing sector in many Asian countries, combined with the relative backwardness of its services sector, has made services sector development a top priority for developing Asia. Our central objective is to broadly survey and analyze the current landscape of the region's...