This paper reviews what the profession has learned during the last 25 years about East Asia's growth using growth accounting exercises and estimations of production functions. The publication of Alwyn Young's (1992, 1994, 1995) and Jong-Il Kim and Lawrence Lau's (1994) studies, and Paul...

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...

This paper argues that the single most important factor that explains East Asia's development success was its fast structural transformation toward industrialization, manufacturing in particular. Workers moved out of agriculture into manufacturing, and the sector diversified and upgraded its...

This paper argues that the single most important factor that explains East Asia's development success was its fast structural transformation toward industrialization, manufacturing in particular. Workers moved out of agriculture into manufacturing, and the sector diversified and upgraded its...

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...

We investigate the claim that national labor markets have become more globally interconnected in recent decades. We do so by deriving estimates over time of three different notions of interconnection: (i) the share of labor demand that is export induced (i.e., all labor demand created by foreign...

This paper shows that because growth models in the tradition of Solow's and Romer's are framed in terms of production functions, they are equally subject to a criticism developed by, among others, Phelps Brown (1957), Simon (1979a), and Samuelson (1979). These authors argued that production...

We use the information compiled as of 15 June 2020 by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in the ADB COVID-19 Policy Database to analyze the measures taken by its 68 members, plus the European Central Bank, and the European Union, to combat the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. Measures...

The severe economic downturn caused by the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has forced governments worldwide to increase spending while tax revenues simultaneously collapsed. Concurrent with this, central banks in several of these countries are financing a significant percent of their...

We provide the first evidence that low- and middle-income countries with high education levels were more successful in developing comparative advantage in products unrelated to those they already export. In contrast, controlling for the relatedness of target products to these countries' exports,...