Foreign direct investment (FDI) flows to developing countries surged in the 1990s to become their leading source of external financing. This rise in FDI volume was accompanied by a marked change in its composition: investment taking the form of acquisition of existing assets (mergers and...

This paper explores empirically the role of risk and return in the observed evolution of net foreign asset positions of industrial and developing economies. The paper adopts a dynamic approach in which investors' portfolios adjust gradually to their long-run equilibrium, defined by a standard...

Economic growth in the Sub-Saharan Africa region has been plagued by a series of shocks-wars, political instability, natural disasters, epidemics, terms-of-trade deterioration, and sudden stops in capital inflows-that have had lingering effects on productivity and growth. Within the overall...

One strand of the empirical growth literature has cast doubt on the ability of the policy recommendations from Washington Consensus in enhancing growth. They argue that not only the design but also the policy mix has an important country-specific component (e.g.Hausmann, Rodrik, & Velasco, 2005;...

We document the properties of business cycles of 71 countries (23 industrial countries and 48 emerging market economies, or EMEs), from 1970q1 to 2012q4 using the Harding and Pagan dating algorithm. First, recessions are deeper, steeper and costlier among EMEs (especially in East Asia and Latin...

The growth prospects of a nation are stymied by the burden of government debt. This study has two goals: first, it tests whether public debt hinders growth; and, second, it explores whether economic policy ameliorates this effect. A large panel data of countries for 1970-2010 reveal a negative...

The main goal of the paper is to evaluate the sources of growth in Chile and the world in the last three decades, but stressing the role of complementarities in economic policies. Therefore, we evaluate the growth determinants for a sample of seventy-eigh

The country studies and their background papers included in this book were prepared for the Latin America and the Caribbean section of the "Global Research Project: Explaining Growth" of the Global Development Network (GDN), a research effort conducted in association with the Latin American and...