The decades-long economic boom that had made East Asia one of the main engines of the global economy has also given rise to concerns about the resource requirements and environmental impacts that the combination of Asian population sizes and Western consumption patterns would engender. In...

This policy brief comments on a number of macro-structural linkages that have implications for firm-level dynamism, which may have served as contributing factors to the stag-deflation that has gripped the OECD region as a whole, including Canada, in recent years. Specific linkages considered...

Participation in the modern, globalized economy necessarily entails some degree of economy-level specialization in terms of the relative intensities of activities, since all economies – and especially developing ones – are small relative to the global economy. At the same time, it has been...

Analysis of the financial crisis in East Asia has focussed on the most-affected East Asian economies, namely: Thailand, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, and to a lesser extent the Philippines. However, these economies account for less than 15 percent of the GDP of East Asia. Japan, which...

For several decades now, the idea that governments should direct industrial policy interventions to specific sectors of the economy has been viewed with more than healthy skepticism. However, the consensus against industrial policy stands in stark contrast to pervasive government practices....

Following WTO accession, China's economy boomed in a context of eye-popping figures for growth in trade and investment and a sharp run-up in its own domestic prices and in prices for commodities for which is has a voracious demand. For many analysts, this suggested that China is the next bubble....

The results of China’s recent census, which showed a continued slowing in population growth triggered much discussion of the implications for China’s economic growth potential and knock-on implications for debt sustainability. Demographic projections show a rapidly aging population, implying...

In the advanced economies, services and intellectual content – the so-called “new economy” – have accounted for an increasing share of output, with a resulting decline in material inputs. While this was partly enabled by the transfer of the weightier parts of production to developing...