Despite its heavy human, financial, and economic cost, the recent global recession provides a unique opportunity to reflect on the knowledge from several decades of growth research, draw policy lessons from the experience of successful countries, and explore new approaches going forward. In an...

Active economic policies by developing countries’ governments to promote growth and industrialization have generally been viewed with suspicion by economists, and for good reasons: past experiences show that such policies have too often failed to achieve their stated objectives. But the...

The dominant view of good governance as a pre-condition for economic success is theoretically compelling but empirically difficult to establish. Historical analyses tend to indicate a very strong correlation between institutional development and economic growth. Today's high-income and...

After long suffering from benign neglect if not outright contempt, industrial policy is almost fashionable again. The global financial and economic crisis known as the Great Recession has forced researchers and policy makers to confront the reality that market forces alone generally do not lead...

This paper explores endogenous institution formation under a catching-up strategy in developing countries. Since the catching-up strategy is normally against the compartive advantages of the developing countries, it can not be implemented through laissez-faire market mechanisms, and a government...

This article applies a general equilibrium model to analyse the impact of new rice technology on household income and uses agricultural household survey data from China to test the implications of this model. It is shown that, when a new rice technology becomes available, the adopting household...

Food availability decline and Sen's entitlement are two leading approaches in understanding causes of famine. Previous research based on case studies has given independent support to each approach. This paper analyses the Chinese famine of 1959-61 by considering jointly the urban bias and the...