An extensive literature argues that India's manufacturing sector has underperformed, and that the country has failed to industrialize; in particular, it has failed to take advantage of its labor-abundant comparative advantage. India's manufacturing sector is smaller as a share of GDP than that of...

The process of economic reforms launched in 1978, and gradually extended until current days, has catapulted China into a stellar growth trajectory that has proven highly resilient. In this paper, we estimate the effect on economic development of China's industrial policy, in particular, the...

This paper empirically investigates whether financial health shores up firm productivity. It presents productivity as another driving factor in translating financial development into real economic progress. The authors' empirical framework employs Levinsohn and Petrin's (2003) semi-parametric...

Today Taiwan is recognized as the largest center of fabless integrated circuit (IC) design firms (firms which design but do not fabricate chips) after the United States, while Hong Kong is a bit player in this global industry. Fifteen years ago things looked quite different. At that time, Hong...

Economic development of a remote, mountainous region is a challenge for any country. This paper examines how this development challenge has been addressed in a high-altitude backward region of the People's Republic of China. Is this region increasingly being left behind or has it entered a...

India has witnessed a series of policy reforms since 1991, which aimed to increase productivity of the manufacturing sector. Did these reforms increase productivity in manufacturing plants? We address this question using rich data from the Annual Survey of Industries in India spanning three...

Azerbaijan is an oil rich country facing three severe problems at the same time: economic volatility, the need to promote industrial diversification and the recent sharp fall in oil prices which many expect to continue. It is thus a highly appropriate time to conduct a study for this...

To help explain the common failure of oil or other natural resource exporting countries to diversify into industry, it has been common to trace this failure to real exchange rate appreciation. This has also been done in Azerbaijan. However, because Azerbaijan has devoted so much of its oil...

Korea's rapid export expansion suddenly began in the early 1960s and boosted the economy. This paper's investigation finds that it began in 1961, as new export items appeared, export of which increased incomparably faster than that of the current export items at the time. How and why of this...

The investment-intensive growth model of the People's Republic of China (PRC) is often viewed as state-driven and ultimately unsustainable. But largely unnoticed, a shift has taken place. This paper examines the changes in investment patterns since 2003 and the potential impact of industrial...