O1 - Economic Development
-
17 November 2016 Structural Reforms and Economic Growth in Emerging-Market Economies
Growth has slowed in many emerging-market economies (EMEs) since the 2007–09 global financial crisis, reflecting both cyclical and structural factors. In this context, it will be in-creasingly important for EMEs to raise potential growth by maintaining steady progress on structural reforms. How do structural reforms generally support growth? What are the re-form priorities for EMEs over recent history and today? Finally, what will be the impact of planned structural reforms on potential output growth among the world’s larger EMEs? These are some of the questions considered by the authors. -
Improving Public Equity Markets? No Pain, No Gain
This paper quantifies the effects of improving public equity markets on macroeconomic aggregates and welfare. I use an open-economy extension of Angeletos (2007), where entrepreneurs face idiosyncratic productivity risk in privately held firms. -
India and the Global Demand for Commodities: Is There an Elephant in the Room?
After 10 years of impressive growth, India is now the fourth largest economy in the world. Yet, to date, India's impact on global commodity markets has been muted. The authors examine how India's domestic and trade policies have distorted and constrained its demand for commodities. -
The Impact of Emerging Asia on Commodity Prices
Over the past 5 years, real energy and non-energy commodity prices have trended sharply higher. These relative price movements have had important implications for inflation and economic activity in both Canada and the rest of the world. China has accounted for the bulk of incremental demand for oil and many base metals over this period. -
Institutional Quality, Trade, and the Changing Distribution of World Income
Conventional wisdom holds that institutional changes and trade liberalization are two main sources of growth in per capita income around the world. -
Working Time over the 20th Century
From 1870 to 2000, the workweek length of employed persons decreased by 41 per cent in industrialized countries. -
The Institutional and Political Determinants of Fiscal Adjustment
The author empirically assesses the effects of institutional and political factors on the need and willingness of governments to make large fiscal adjustments. -
Commodity-Linked Bonds: A Potential Means for Less-Developed Countries to Raise Foreign Capital
The author suggests that commodity-linked bonds could provide a potential means for less-developed countries (LDCs) to raise money on the international capital markets, rather than through standard forms of financing. -
Financial Constraints and Investment: Assessing the Impact of a World Bank Loan Program on Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in Sri Lanka
The authors examine the investment behaviour of a sample of small, credit-constrained firms in Sri Lanka. Using a unique panel-data set, they analyze and compare the activities of two groups of small firms distinguished by their different access to financing; one group consists of firms with heavily subsidized loans from the World Bank, and the other consists of firms without such subsidies. -
Do Peer Group Members Outperform Individual Borrowers? A Test of Peer Group Lending Using Canadian Micro-Credit Data
Microfinance institutions now serve over 10 million poor households in the developing and developed world, and much of their success has been attributed to their innovative use of peer group lending. There is very little empirical evidence, however, to suggest that group lending schemes offer a superior institutional design over lending programs that serve individual borrowers.