Developing Asia has weathered the global economic crisis well and is experiencing a rapid, robust V-shaped recovery. According to conventional wisdom, the fiscal stimulus packages put in place by the region's governments played a key role in the region's superior postcrisis performance. The...

The construction of a New Socialist Countryside (NSC) is among the highlights in the People's Republic of China's (PRC) 11th Five-Year Plan (2006-2010). The NSC aims to accelerate the development and modernization of the agricultural and rural economy in order to close the widening rural-urban...

We use establishment-level data from Indian manufacturing to describe the distribution of firm size in terms of employment, and discuss implications for public policy. A unique feature of our analysis is the use of nationally representative establishment-level data from both the registered...

We apply a stochastic frontier production model to data from 53 countries during 1991-2003 to estimate total factor productivity growth, and decompose it into technical efficiency change and technical progress. Our empirical results indicate that world productivity growth was led by fast-growing...

As the global crisis hit developing Asia, several countries instituted fiscal stimulus measures to create domestic demand. With the region returning to normal times, in this paper we draw lessons using historical data from 10 developing Asian countries to examine if countercyclical fiscal policy...

This paper examines the nexus between capital flows and real exchange rate (RER) in emerging Asian countries using a dynamic panel-data model for 2000–2009. In contrast to previous studies, capital flows here are separated into foreign direct investment (FDI), portfolio investment, and other...

There are significant income and nonincome development gaps around the world. Closing these gaps will require not only increasing and sustaining economic growth in low-income regions, but also policies that close nonincome development gaps directly. Governments need to support private investment...

This paper revisits the issue of the evolution and choice of exchange rate regimes in Asia. The paper first compiles and discusses the de jure or official exchange rate regimes in various developing and emerging Asian economies. It then goes on to offer a simple empirical estimation of the...

A crisis provides an opportunity to examine how an economy works under pathological conditions. What are the lessons? Markets work well most of the time. That said, the global financial crisis has weakened faith in the market's self-equilibrating qualities. Fiscal policy works well to offset...

It would be easy to say that central banks should consider asset prices as one of the objectives to avoid boom and bust cycles, as happened in the 2007-2009 crisis; the dotcom bubble of 2001; and the Japanese boom and bust of the 1980s and 1990s. However, its implementation would be theoretically...