This essay is about an important area in which there has been major rethinking-industrial policy, by which the authors mean government policies directed at affecting the economic structure of the economy. The standard argument was that markets were efficient, so there was no need for government...

Biographical note: Justin Yifu Lin is founding director and professor at the China Centre for Economic Research at Peking University. From 2008 to 2012, he served as chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank. His many books include "Demystifying the Chinese Economy" and...

They are being hailed as the new Holy Grail of economic development. The success of special economic zones (SEZ) in general and specialized ones in particular (industrial and technology parks) in countries as diverse as Australia, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, Japan, the United...

After long suffering from benign neglect if not outright contempt, industrial policy is almost fashionable again. The global financial and economic crisis known as the Great Recession has forced researchers and policy makers to confront the reality that market forces alone generally do not lead...

This paper assesses some of the main strands of the theoretical literature on unemployment and employment and shows that their interesting conclusions may not be transferable to low-income countries whose endowment and production structures are profoundly different from that of high-income...

Each institutional arrangement in a financial system has both advantages and disadvantages in mobilizing savings, allocating capital, diversifying risks, and processing information when facilitating financial transactions. Meanwhile, the factor endowment in an economy at each stage of its...