The ability of the World Bank to strike an appropriate balance between country demands and global goods depends on the institution’s shareholders. Yet, the deterioration in the bilateral relationship between the United States and China now threatens to undermine effective governance at the instituti...

The productivity drought and the unending search for GDP growth by high- and middle-income countries has drawn attention to the flagging vigor of large incumbent corporations and the need to groom a crop of "unicorns"—highly valued, entrepreneurial, superstar firms can potentially dial up competitio...

On balance, the Southeast Asian countries have done better than Latin American countries by pursuing export-led industrial strategies, however, unlike the Tigers, neither group has been able to enter the ranks of high-income countries. This note offers reasons for the shortfall in growth and briefly...

The unprecedented turnout at rallies across Pakistan protesting corruption and poor job prospects underscores the frustration among the rapidly growing middle class with governance failures. Pakistan’s economic growth exceeded India’s for over four decades after its independence in 1947, but since t...

Simon Kuznets’ pathbreaking study of modern economic growth was published in 1966.[1] In it and in preceding monographs he identified the salient characteristics of economic change based on data from national accounts, the construction of which he pioneered.

The first section of this note examines the causes and consequences of Afghanistan’s financial crisis and lays out policy options the international community can support to enable urgent financial flows and restore the basic functioning of the Afghan financial system. The next section examines prosp...

India has had a long and (mostly) distinguished record in monitoring poverty, based on the National Sample Surveys (NSS), done by the government of India’s National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO). (The surveys have had many applications, but here the focus is on measuring poverty.) Prior to the e...