Rapid and sustained economic growth in the emerging world has brought new members, notably China, into the group of middle-income countries. Reaching this level of income, however, has historically presented countries with a new set of challenges to development, resulting in slowing growth and...

The empirical literature on development has labelled as “middle-income trap” (MIT) the fact that many developing economies struggle to adjust to new sources of growth after reaching middle-income levels. For Latin America and the Caribbean, this is an especially challenging scenario, as only...

Chinese Taipei; Hong Kong, China; Korea and Singapore (the East Asian Newly Industrialised Countries or NICs) have been successful in attaining income convergence with high-income countries while Latin American countries remain caught in the Middle-Income Trap. The East Asian NICs pursued...

This paper takes stock of the main structural reforms that Greece has undertaken since 2010, those currently proposed and that are in the process of implementation, and quantifies the medium and long‑term effects on output. Special attention is given to three issues that are relevant to...

This paper combines development and growth accounting exercises with economic theory to estimate the relative importance of total factor productivity and the accumulation of factors of production in the economic development performance of Latin America. The region's development performance is...

This paper combines development and growth accounting exercises with economic theory to estimate the relative importance of total factor productivity and the accumulation of factors of production in the economic development performance of Latin America. The region’s development performance is...

This paper analyzes the long-run relationship between output collapses—defined defined as GDP falling substantially below trend—and total factor productivity (TFP), using a panel of 71 developed and developing countries during the period 1960-2003 to identify episodes of output collapse and...

This paper combines development and growth accounting exercises with economic theory to estimate the relative importance of total factor productivity and the accumulation of factors of production in the economic development performance of Latin America. The region's development performance is...

In the first eight decades of the XX century, Brazil ranked among the countries with highest growth rates in the world. During the period 1930-80, in particular, it managed to reduce its per capita income gap vis-à-vis industrialized economies and seemed poised to escape underdevelopment early...