Development economists are paid to look into the future. They ask not only how things work today, but also how a new policy, program, or project will make them work tomorrow. They view the world and history as a learning process, past and present are just inputs into thinking about what's...

This paper takes a hard look at the experience with official intervention in sovereign debt crises, focusing on debt crises of the 1980s, Russia in 1998, Argentina in 2001, and Greece in 2010. Based on the track record, the authors argue that in situations where countries face a solvency...

This paper studies the existence of middle-income growth traps in a two-period overlapping generations model of economic growth with two types of labor and endogenous occupational choices. It also distinguishes between "basic" and "advanced" infrastructure, with the latter promoting design...

Confidence in combining inflation-targeting-cum-flexible-exchange-rate regimes with isolated microprudential regulation as a means to guarantee both macroeconomic and financial stability has been shattered by the scale and synchronization of asset price booms and busts that preceded the current...

This paper studies the long-run impact of policies aimed at fostering gender equality on economic growth in Brazil. The first part provides a brief review of gender issues in the country. The second part presents a gender-based, three-period OLG model that accounts for women's time allocation...

This note examines in detail Brazil s export performance over the past 15 years, focusing not only on growth and composition, but also on different performance dimensions, including diversification, sophistication, and firm dynamics. The analysis uses international comparisons to better situate...

Although Brazil has become one of the largest economies in the world, it remains among the most closed economies as measured by the share of exports and imports in gross domestic product. This feature cannot be explained simply by the size of Brazils economy. Rather, it is due to an economic...

To this day, policy makers, policy advisers, and economists in development institutions do not have any practical tools to help them to assess the impacts of policies aimed at promoting gender equality and quantify the effect of these policies on growth. Yet, there has been limited effort in...

An abundance of natural resources is intuitively expected to be a blessing. Nonetheless, it has been argued for some decades that large endowments of natural resources oil, gas, and minerals in particular may actually become more of a curse, often leading to slow economic growth and...

This note examines one of the most fundamental questions to emerge from the Great Recession of 2007-9: how to regrow global economic growth going forward? Although all are painfully aware that it may be 2013 or 2014 before the global economy returns to normalcy, no one is sanguine about medium-...