We provide an outline for viewing the middle-income trap through the lens of the Schumpeterian growth paradigm, which places the notion of creative destruction at the center of economic growth. Economic growth and development come from the interplay between changes in economic structure and...

This paper takes a first pass at assessing areas of implementation for distributed ledger (or blockchain) technology in the context of development finance. It identifies five use cases, including digital identity, trade finance, project aid monitoring, smart energy, and supply chain management....

We assess the effect of the United States (US) and domestic monetary policies on emerging market economies (EMEs) using a panel factor-augmented vector autoregressive model. We find a US policy rate hike outstrips a tantamount hike in EME policy rates in its impacts on EMEs and discover that...

In this study, we construct a new dependency ratio measure by taking into account the consumption needs of the young and elderly people, and the productivity of middle-aged people. Different from the way that Cutler et al. (1990) and Weil (1999) constructed the relative needs by using the...

The Government of India initiated a program in 1994 to promote manufacturing in districts designated as backward. The way the backward districts were identified enables us to employ a regression discontinuity design to evaluate the impacts of the program. We find that the program's 5-year tax...

We examine the importance of total factor productivity (TFP) growth in middle-income countries based on cross-country panel data for the period 1975-2014. We find that TFP growth contributed significantly to a country’s upward transition from middle-income to high-income country group. The TFP...

Developing Asia has undergone a dramatic shift over the past 5 decades from a region of mainly lowincome economies toward one that is largely middle income. Compared with world aggregate data, developing Asia now has a much greater proportion of middle-income economies. The region faces the...

We examine the evolution of infrastructure, and the impact of infrastructure investment, in middleincome countries (MICs). We document how different types of infrastructure stocks, as well as infrastructure investment, vary with the level of development and growth performance. We then use the...

There is mixed evidence for the impact of international capital flows on financial sector's stability. This paper investigates the relationship between components of gross capital flows and various financial stability indicators for 16 emerging and newly industrialized economies. Departing from...

Since 1990, countries in emerging Europe and Central Asia have undergone comprehensive economic transformation. These reforms helped achieve an impressive degree of income convergence toward the levels of the advanced economies, although at the cost of rising inequality and lower life...