Unit labor costs in some of the eurozone countries, calculated using aggregate data, increased significantly during the years before the crisis. In this paper, we show that: (i) the construction of unit labor costs using aggregate data, the standard practice, leads to serious problems of...

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...

We forecast average annual GDP growth for 147 countries for 2010–2030. We use a cross-country regression model where the long-run fundamentals are determined by the countries’ accumulated capabilities and the capacity to undergo structural transformation.

An extensive literature argues that India’s manufacturing sector has underperformed, and that the country has failed to industrialize; in particular, it has failed to take advantage of its labor–abundant comparative advantage. India’s manufacturing sector is smaller as a share of GDP than...

Becoming a rich country requires being able to produce and export commodities that embody certain characteristics. We classify 779 commodities (exported) according to two dimensions: (1) sophistication (measured by the income content of the products exported) and (2) connectivity to other...

Long-run growth is about the structural transformation (diversification and upgrading) of the economy, itself a function of the accumulation of capabilities that allows a country to produce new and more unique products. In this paper, we develop an "Index of Opportunities" for 96 non-high-income...

With a decrease in formal trade barriers, trade facilitation has come into prominence as a policy tool for promoting trade. In this paper, we use a gravity model to examine the relationship between bilateral trade flows and trade facilitation. We also estimate the gains in trade derived from...

This paper provides a working definition of what the middle-income trap is. We start by defining four income groups of GDP per capita in 1990 PPP dollars: low-income below $2,000; lower-middle-income between $2,000 and $7,250; upper-middle-income between $7,250 and $11,750; and high-income above $11,750....

Development is a process of transforming a country's economic structure towards the production and export of more complex products. We use Hidalgo and Hausmann's (2009) method of reflections to compute measures of product and country complexity, and rank 5107 products and 124 countries. We find...

The key factor underlying China's fast development during the last 50 years is its ability to master and accumulate new and more complex capabilities, reflected in the increase in diversification and sophistication of its export basket. This accumulation was policy induced and not the result of...