China is well-placed to avoid the so-called “middle-income trap” and to continue to converge towards the more advanced economies, even though growth is likely to slow from near double-digit rates in the first decade of this millennium to around 7% at the 2020 horizon. However, in order to...

This paper investigates whether OECD countries are facing secular stagnation. Secular stagnation is defined as a situation when policy interest rates bounded at zero fail to stimulate demand sufficiently, due to low or negative neutral real interest rates and low inflation, and when ensuing...

As its workforce ages and major economies shift towards producing higher value-added goods and services, New Zealand will face increasing challenges to remain globally competitive and maintain high living standards. Future growth will need to come increasingly from productivity gains, and...

The economic effects of environmental policies are of central interest to policymakers. The traditional approach sees environmental policies as a burden on economic activity, at least in the short to medium term, as they raise costs without increasing output and restrict the set of production...

Effective macroeconomic and structural policies helped Turkey bounce back quickly and strongly from the global crisis, with annual growth averaging close to 9% over 2010-11. However, the current account deficit widened to around 10% of GDP in 2011 and consumer price inflation rose to over 10%....

This paper presents an explanation of how the dynamic but uncertain process of economic development and growth occurs. It shows that economic development leads to structural change, an enhancement of capabilities and path dependence in the economy. It examines three different approaches to...

Both theory and evidence suggest that innovation shapes output and productivity growth. This report develops a broad conceptual and empirical framework against which innovation policy issues in New Zealand can be assessed and evaluated.

There is strong theoretical and empirical support linking business research and development, innovation and productivity growth at a national level. There is also strong evidence of spillovers from business R&D. The magnitude of these spillovers is economically significant and warrants...

The Ministry of Economic Development ran a series of seminars about economic growth in 2004. One was an economic history of economic growth in New Zealand, three were on different and sometimes contradictory conceptual ways of thinking about economic growth – endogenous growth theory, Austrian...

This paper provides an in depth analysis of Russia’s recent growth, with a view to understanding the prospects for its continuation. It examines in detail the main drivers of growth, as well as the main developments and policies that have been underlying it. A key finding is that the role of...