Few economic ideas are as intuitive as the notion that increasing investment is the best way to raise future output. This idea was the basis for the theory quot;capital fundamentalism.quot; Under this view, differences in national stocks of capital were the primary determinants of differences in...

This paper reviews the empirical and theoretical literature on economic growth to examine how the four components of the climate change bill, namely mitigation, proactive (ex ante) adaptation, reactive (ex post) adaptation, and ultimate damages of climate change affect growth, especially in...

The empirical literature on finance and development suggests that countries with better developed financial systems experience faster economic growth. Financial development - as captured by size, depth, efficiency, and reach of financial systems - varies sharply around the world, with large...

The 2009 global recession demonstrated, once again, the importance of crisis prevention as well as the critical need for preserving policy room so that emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) can act when their economies are hit by shocks. And now, with the global growth outlook still...

Ghana has experienced a decade of solid and exceptionally high growth. Between 2005 and 2015, income nearly doubled. This paper analyzes the factors driving this impressive growth performance, using tools such as structural change decompositions and growth regressions. For the comparative...

East Asia, for long the epitome of successful engagement in trade, faces serious challenges: technological change that may threaten the very model of labor intensive industrialization and a backlash against globalization that may reduce access to important markets. A detailed analysis of the...

This paper uses the night lights (satellite imagery from outer space) approach to estimate growth in and levels of subnational 2013 gross domestic product for 47 counties in Kenya and 30 districts in Rwanda. Estimating subnational gross domestic product is consequential for three reasons. First,...

In conflict-prone situations, access to markets is necessary to restore economic growth and generate the preconditions for peace and reconstruction. Hence, the rehabilitation of damaged transport infrastructure has emerged as an overarching investment priority among donors and governments. This...

This paper focuses on three interrelated questions on urbanization and the geography of development. First, although we herald cities with their industrial bases as "engines of growth," does industrialization in fact drive urbanization? While such relationships appear in the data, the process is...

This paper discusses the theoretical arguments in favor of and against economic globalization and, with a view to ascertaining whether Latin America may be able to capture the globalization upside, examines the trends and salient features of Latin America's globalization as compared with that of...