A large and growing literature has argued that industrialized and developing countries behave very differently in relation to their fiscal policy stances over the business cycle. In this paper, the authors provide new evidence on the cyclicality of fiscal policy across industrialized and...

Lao PDR economic growth continues to be strong in 2010, against the backdrop of a fragile global recovery yet dynamic regional demand. Growth is projected at 8.5 percent in 2010, from 7.5 percent in 2009. The resources sector is projected to contribute about 4 percentage points of economic...

Lao PDR's real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth will remain robust in 2011 with projected growth of 8.6 percent compared to 8.4 percent in 2010. Natural resources and manufacturing sectors are expected to drive growth this year. The expected growth in the garment exports (by about 15-20...

The Lao PDR economy continues to grow vigorously at 8 percent this year despite the impact of typhoons and slower growth in the global economy. That being said, the country's growth estimate was revised slightly downwards to 8 percent from an early estimate of 8.6 percent to account for (i) the...

The Lao economy is estimated to have grown at around 7 percent in 2016, a slight moderation from 7.4 percent in the previous year. Inflation pressures remain low, though prices increased faster in the second half of the year as oil prices recovered. The fiscal deficit widened significantly in...

This paper reviews the determinants of Latin America's uneven growth based on an accounting decomposition that breaks down countries' growth (relative to the world) into three trade-related channels: (i) an export pull measuring the traction exerted by the country's exports, (ii) an external...

Ghana has experienced a decade of solid and exceptionally high growth. Between 2005 and 2015, income nearly doubled. This paper analyzes the factors driving this impressive growth performance, using tools such as structural change decompositions and growth regressions. For the comparative...

What major insights have emerged from development economics in the past decade, and how do they matter for the World Bank? This challenging question was recently posed by World Bank Group President David Malpass to the staff of the Development Research Group. This paper assembles a set of 13...

There is a growing body of literature exploring the skill content of jobs. This paper contributes to this research by using data on the task content of occupations in developing countries, instead of U.S. data, as most existing studies do. The paper finds that indexes based on U.S. data do not...