Growth and structural reforms: A new assessment

This paper presents a simultaneous assessment of the relationship between economic performance and three groups of economic reforms: domestic finance, trade, and the capital account. Domestic financial reforms and trade reforms are robustly associated with economic growth, but only in middle-income countries. In contrast, there is no evidence of a systematic positive relationship between capital account liberalization and economic growth. Moreover, the effect of domestic financial reforms on economic growth in middle-income countries is accounted for by improvements in measured aggregate TFP growth, not by higher aggregate investment. Additional analysis suggests that sufficiently developed property rights are a precondition for reaping the benefits of financial and trade reforms. Our results are robust to endogeneity bias and a number of alternative specifications.