The paper investigates the economic effects of major product market reforms in some of the historically most protected non-manufacturing industries. It relies on a unique mapping between new annual data on reform shocks and sector-level outcomes for five network industries (electricity and gas,...

Wide-ranging structural reforms are underway in Italy, aimed at addressing key bottlenecks in the product and labor markets. Our analysis, based on the IMF's Global Integrated Monetary and Fiscal model (GIMF), attempts to quantify the potential gains to the economy from a comprehensive package...

The East African Community (EAC) has been among the fastest growing regions in sub-Saharan Africa in the past decade or so. Nonetheless, the recent growth path will not be enough to achieve middle-income status and substantial poverty reduction by the end of the decade-the ambition of most...

This paper constructs an industry-level dataset of productivity across advanced economies, showing that Korea’s labor productivity and total factor productivity levels are below the median of other advanced economies. We identify sizable industry-level productivity gaps in Korea with respect...

The qualitative and granular nature of most structural indicators and the variety in data sources poses difficulties for consistent cross-country assessments and empirical analysis. We overcome these issues by using a machine learning approach (the partial least squares method) to combine a...

The “middle-income trap” is the phenomenon of hitherto rapidly growing economies stagnating at middle-income levels and failing to graduate into the ranks of high-income countries. In this study we examine the middle-income trap as a special case of growth slowdowns, which are identified as...

The contribution of the information and communication technology (ICT) sector to growth in Asian economies is clearly evident from the expenditure side (net exports) and became particularly significant in the second half of the 1990s. This paper employs an extension of the standard growth...

This paper offers empirical evidence that greater financial inclusion of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) can promote higher economic growth and employment, especially in the Middle East and Central Asia regions. First, we show that countries with higher SME financial inclusion exhibit more...

This paper documents the downward trend in the labor share of global income since the early 1990s, as well as its heterogeneous evolution across countries, industries and worker skill groups, using a newly assembled dataset, and analyzes the drivers behind it. Technological progress, along with...

The limited access to bank credit in recent years has increased the pressure on small and medium size enterprises (SMEs), forcing them to scale down investment plans and production. This paper, which explores the macroeconomic implications of this channel, finds evidence that countries with high...