Côte d’Ivoire seeks a development strategy to reach middle-income status—a challenge that would require annual growth rates averaging 10 percent over the next 13 years. Global experience of both developed and emerging economies shows that GDP per capita rises with increased urbanization....

Sourcing intermediate goods efficiently is essential for a country's production capacity. Countries located in a neighborhood providing a wide range of intermediate goods cheaply available can take advantage of scale economies to reduce their production costs and improve their global...

Armenia's strong economic growth from 2001-2008, when real gross domestic product (GDP) grew 12.6 percent per year on average, boosted living standards and created the fiscal headroom necessary for the Government to respond to the 2009 financial crisis with a large fiscal stimulus. As a result,...

Major events have reshaped the internal population flows of Eurasia, including the breakup of the Soviet Union, the development of market economies, and the rising influence of regional powers. Looking ahead, policy makers need to promote reforms to make Eurasian cities the main drivers of...

In new economic geography models, geographic concentration can't arise because of workers' mobility or vertical linkages between firms. We examine a setup that combines those two approaches in conjunction with local congestion costs. We find that, as trade costs are lowered, the geographic...

This study examines the impact of the African Growth and Opportunity Act using the synthetic control method, a quasi-experimental approach. The novelty in the approach is that it addresses problems of estimation that are prevalent in nonexperimental methods used to analyze the impact of...

Intra-subsaharan African trade appears to be very limited, an outcome that is often justified on the grounds of the size of the exporting and the importing economies. If that were the explanation, there would be no untapped trade potential. We argue instead that the main determinant of this...

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Acronyms and Abbreviations -- Executive Summary -- 1. The Need for Central Asian Countries to Diversify Their Trade -- Recent Export Performance -- Diversification Potential -- 2. The Constraints Facing Central Asian Leading Cities -- The Constraints to...

The strong economic performance of Sub-Saharan Africa's resource-rich countries since the start of the 21st century has been celebrated as a return to more buoyant growth and renewed convergence with the advanced economies.Despite the recent progress in improving living standards and reducing...