This paper asks, first, whether today's developing economies can achieve high-income status without first building large manufacturing sectors. We find that practically every economy that enjoys a high income today experienced a manufacturing employment share in excess of 18%-20% sometime since...

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...

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,...

We examine the effects of trade and services liberalization on wage inequality in India. We find that labor reallocations and wage shifts attributable to liberalization account for at most 29% of the increase in inequality between 1993 and 2004, and that effects of services reforms are many...

In response to the spike in rice prices in 2008, the rice subsidy program budget for the Philippines's National Food Authority (NFA) was expanded five-fold to 2.5% of gross domestic product. The NFA is the largest recipient of government subsidy, but also the largest loss-making government...

This paper proposes and analyzes one possible reason why some countries get stuck in the middle-income trap: the role played by the changing structure of the economy (from low-productivity activities into high-productivity activities), the types of products exported (not all products have the...

This paper provides a working definition of what the middle-income trap is. It classifies 124 countries that have consistent data for 1950–2010. First, the paper defines four income groups of gross domestic product per capita in 1990 purchasing power parity dollars: low-income below $2,000; lower...

Relative to other developing regions, developing Asia has experienced a slower decline in employment share in agriculture, compared to its output share; a rapid growth in labor and land productivity; and a shift from agricultural output from traditional to high-value products. The most successful...

During the last few years, the newly coined term middle-income trap has been widely used by policymakers to refer to the middle-income economies that seem to be stuck in the middle-income range. However, there is no accepted definition of the term in the literature. In this paper, we study...