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...

Postcrisis policy responses tilted in favor of strengthening the global regulatory system and financial stability have limited the attention paid to the role of finance in supporting sustained economic growth and development. This has special implications for Asia which, despite being the new...

We explore how demographic changes in the Asia and Pacific region are likely to influence economic growth and other features of the regional economy. While many low-income countries in the region will continue to experience a demographic dividend, over time population aging could drag on...

We investigate the characteristics of manufacturing firms in India that generate better quality employment and the relationship between quality employment and firm performance using multiple measures of employment quality. Larger firms tend to generally provide better quality employment...

Employment generation has been a challenge in Indonesia since the Asian financial crisis, especially in labor-intensive manufacturing. Drawing on work by James and Fujita (2000), this paper examines the impact of exports on jobs, based on an analysis of input-output tables over the period...

This paper presents the results of a choice experiment study undertaken to value electricity service attributes in Madhya Pradesh, India. Primary data was collected from 2,083 households using stratified random sampling method. Results show that existing service is very poor and consumers have...

Using international data starting 1957, we construct a sample of cases where fast-growing economies slow down. The evidence suggests that rapidly growing economies slow down significantly, in the sense that the growth rate downshifts by at least 2 percentage points when their per capita incomes...

This paper examines the extent to which increases in international food prices during the past few years have been transmitted to domestic prices in selected Asian developing countries. In analyzing the historical data, evidence on price transmission for important food commodities such as rice,...

Regional corridors are popular components of regional cooperation initiatives and have been in use for several years. Yet discussion about development of these corridors tends to be relatively general in scope and difficult to pin down in terms of content and implications. This paper elaborates...

This paper investigates the impacts of climate change on the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) grain output using rural household survey data. We highlight the regional differences of impacts by estimating output elasticities for different grain crops and different regions. Our results...