The People's Republic of China's (PRC) remarkable growth performance over the last 3 decades has been associated to very robust export growth, so much so that many refer to it as a clear example of export-led growth (ELG). Using the concept of the balance-of-payments equilibrium (BOPE) growth...

This paper introduces a new index of financial inclusion for 151 economies using principal component analysis to compute weights for aggregating nine indicators of access, availability, and usage. It then assesses the impact of financial inclusion on poverty and income inequality. The results...

Agricultural statistics derived from remote sensing data have been used primarily to compare land use information and changes over time. Nonclassical measurement error from farmer self-reports has been well documented in the survey design literature primarily in comparison to plots measured...

Despite a growing interest in using satellite data to estimate paddy rice yield in Southeast Asia, significant cloud coverage has led to a scarcity of usable optical data for such analysis. In this paper, we study the feasibility of using two alternative sources of satellite data - (i) surface...

This paper analyzes why the Philippines' growth performance has improved significantly in recent years. As in the medium to long term actual growth adjusts to potential, we posit that the reason behind this improvement is that the country’s potential growth is increasing. We derive an estimate...

We reflect state-owned enterprises' (SOE) leverage within the standard debt sustainability assessment framework. Based on company data and the interest coverage ratio as a measure of debt at risk, aggregate baseline projections and fan charts gauge SOE debt as a contingent liability to the...

Gauging foreign (domestic) biases as the deviation of foreign (domestic) investors' actual portfolio allocation of a bond market from the same bond market's weight in global bond market, we investigate the determinants of foreign and domestic investment biases in 41 global bond markets. We find...

We present three conditions for a demography-driven middle-income trap and show that many economies in East, South, and Southeast Asia satisfy all of them. The conditions are (1) support ratio - the ratio of workers to consumers - matters for economic growth, (2) economic development accompanies...

In this paper, we propose a panel approach in the construction of the Asia-Pacific Regional Cooperation and Integration Index (ARCII) to strengthen the index's ability to track the progress of economic integration in the region over time. Panel-based procedures are employed in imputing missing...

This paper studies the effects of firms' investments in information and communication technologies (ICT) on their demand for female and skilled workers. Using the gradual liberalization of the broadband Internet sector across provinces from 2006 to 2009 as a source of exogenous variation to...