The worldwide slowdown in growth after 1975 was a major negative fiscal shock. Slower growth lowers the present value of tax revenues and primary surpluses and thus makes a given level of debt more burdensome. Most countries failed to adjust to the negative fiscal consequences of the growth...

This book is organized as follows: Introduction; by William Easterly and Luis Serven Latin America's Infrastructure in The Era of Macroeconomic Crises; by Cesar Calderon, William Easterly, and Luis Serven The Output Cost of Latin America's Infrastructure Gap; by Cesar Calderon and Luis Serven...

The article documents five stylized facts of economic growth: (1) the 'residual' (total factor productivity, tfp) rather than factor accumulation accounts for most of the income and growth differences across countries; (2) income diverges over the long run; (3) factor accumulation is persistent...

Fiscal adjustment becomes like walking up the down escalator when growth-promoting spending is cut so much as to lower growth and thus the present value of future tax revenues to a degree that more than offsets the improvement in the cash deficit. Although short-term cash flows matter, a...

The authors systematically document remarkably high degrees of concentration in manufacturing exports for a sample of 151 countries over a range of 3,000 products. For every country manufacturing exports are dominated by a few "big hits" which account for most of the export value and where the...

This paper studies the transmission of business cycle fluctuations for developed (N ) to developing economies (S ) with a two-country, asymmetric, DSGE model with endogenous development of new technologies in N, and sunk costs of exporting and transferring the production of the intermediate...

Empirical evidence - including the current global crisis - suggests that shocks from advanced countries often have a disproportionate effect on developing economies. Can this account for the fact that aggregate fluctuations are larger and more persistent in the latter than in the former...

This study collects data on the sophistication of technologies used at the business function level for a representative sample of firms in Vietnam, Senegal, and the Brazilian state of Ceara. The analysis finds a large variance in technology sophistication across the business functions of a firm....

There is limited evidence on the role of participating in international trade in the diffusion of technologies. This paper analyzes the impact of exporting on firms' adoption of more sophisticated technologies, using a novel dataset, the Firm-level Adoption of Technology survey, which includes...

This paper examines technology sophistication in establishments. To comprehensively measure technology sophistication, a grid is created that covers key business functions and the technologies used to conduct them. Analyzing data from over 21,000 establishments in 15 countries, the authors find...