The International Comparison Program (ICP) compares levels of economic activity and relative price levels among countries of the world. The main feature of the ICP is that it produces spatial indexes or purchasing power parities (PPPs) that allow cross-country comparison of gross domestic...

The emergence of biofuel as a renewable energy source offers opportunities for climate change mitigation and greater energy security for many countries. At the same time, biofuel represents the possibility of substitution between energy and food. For developing countries like India, which...

One of developing Asia’s foremost structural economic challenges is the need to rebalance demand and growth toward domestic sources in the face of one of its most significant structural shifts—the demographic transition to an older population. The scope for investment-led growth may be quite...

There is a lack of verifiable evidence on the period and magnitude of the demographic dividends in India, a gap policy makers must address when setting priorities for human resource and capital investment to harvest the economic benefits of the demographic transition currently under way. This...

This paper attempts to measure the size of South–South foreign direct investment (FDI) in developing East Asia and the trends in it, and the characteristics of the investing countries and the investments themselves. It also summarizes the findings of studies in individual countries of the...

The central objective of this paper is to empirically examine the issue of fiscal sustainability in developing Asia. To do so, we first diagnose the region’s public finances by analyzing the evolution of key fiscal indicators over time and across subregions. We then estimate fiscal policy...

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...

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...

Emerging Asian economies have made strong progress in improving educational capital in the past 40 years. High educational attainment, especially at the secondary level, has significantly improved emerging Asia’s educational achievement. Regressions show that better parental education and...

Policies and programs designed to protect workers may, paradoxically, have a negative impact on labor as a whole by increasing unemployment. A key question is which policies have this effect. Using a 3-year panel of 90 countries, the study finds that the unemployment rate is affected by the...