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...

This paper attempts to reconcile the apparent contradiction between two strands of the literature on the effects of financial intermediation on economic activity. On the one hand, the empirical growth literature finds a positive effect of financial depth as measured by, for instance, private...

This is the background paper for the productivity extension of the World Bank's Long-Term Growth Model (LTGM). Based on an extensive literature review, the paper identifies the main determinants of economic productivity as innovation, education, market efficiency, infrastructure, and...