Natural Resources, Neither Curse nor Destiny Lederman, Daniel; Maloney, William F
The World Bank eBooks,
2006, 10-23-2006, 2007, 2006-10-23, 20070101, 2011-12-06 00:00:00
eBook, Book
Open access
This volume studies the role of natural resources in development and economic diversification. It brings together a variety of analytical perspectives, ranging from econometric analyses of economic ...growth to historical studies of successful development experiences in countries with abundant natural resources.
Productivity Revisited Cusolito, Ana Paula; Maloney, William F
Washington, DC: World Bank eBooks,
2018, 12-21-2018, 2018-10-25
eBook, Book
Open access
The stagnation of productivity in the developing world, and indeed, across the globe, over the last two decades dictates a rethinking of productivity measurement, analysis, and policy. This volume ...presents a 'second wave' of thinking in three key areas of productivity analysis and its implications for productivity policies. It calls into question the measurement and relevance of distortions as the primary barrier to productivity growth; urges a broader concept of firm performance that goes beyond efficiency to quality upgrading and demand expansion; and explores what it takes to generate an experimental and innovative society where entrepreneurs have the personal characteristics to identify new technologies and manage risk within an entrepreneurial ecosystem that facilitates them doing so. It also reviews arguments surrounding industrial policies. The authors argue for an integrated approach to productivity analysis that incorporates both the need to reduce economic distortions and generate the human capital capable of identifying the opportunities offered to follower countries and upgrade firm capabilities. Finally, it offers guidance on prioritizing policies when there is uncertainty around diagnostics and limited government capability.
The innovation paradox Cirera, Xavier; Maloney, William F
Washington, DC: World Bank eBooks,
2017., 2017, 10-2-2017, 2017-10-03
eBook, Book
Open access
The innovation paradox -- The nature of innovation in developing countries -- The innovation paradox, benchmarking and the national innovation system -- Managerial practices as key firm capabilities ...for innovation -- The process of building and accumulating managerial capabilities -- Supporting innovation : agencies and government capability -- Instruments to support firm capabilities for innovation -- The continuing challenge of innovation and capability building in developing countries.
Place matters for productivity and prosperity. Myriad factors support a successful place, including not only the hard infrastructure such as roads, but also the softer elements such as worker skills, ...entrepreneurial ability, and well-functioning institutions. History suggests that prosperous places tend to persist, while “left behind” regions, or those hurt by climatic, technological, or commercial shocks, struggle to catch up. This division gives rise to demands to “do something” about the subsequent spatial inequality. Such pressures often result in costly spatially targeted policies whose outcomes disappoint because of a lack of analysis of the underlying barriers to growth and structural transformation and a fair appraisal of the possibility of overcoming them.
The latest volume of the World Bank Productivity Project series, Place, Productivity, and Prosperity: Revisiting Spatially Targeted Policies for Regional Development makes three broad contributions. First, it provides new analytical and empirical insights into the three drivers of economic geography—agglomeration economies, migration, and distance—and the way in which they interact. Second, it argues that these forces are playing out differently in developing countries than they have in advanced countries: urbanization is not accompanied by structural transformation, leaving cities simply crowded and accruing all the negative aspects of urbanization without being productively concentrated. Long-term amelioration of poverty in lagging regions requires advancing the overall national agenda of structural change and productivity growth. Third, the volume provides a heuristic framework with which to inform policy makers’ assessments of place-based policy proposals, enabling them to identify the regions in which policy is likely to have an impact and those that are nonviable; to clarify the implications of various policy options; to think critically about policy design priorities, including necessary complementary policies to, for instance, infrastructure investment; and to navigate implementation challenges.
Informality Revisited Maloney, William F
World development,
07/2004, Volume:
32, Issue:
7
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The paper draws on recent evidence––economic, sociological and anthropological––from Latin America to forward a view of the informal sector in developing countries primarily as an unregulated ...microentrepreneurial sector and not as a disadvantaged residual of segmented labor markets. It offers alternative explanations for many of the characteristics of the sector customarily regarded as evidence of its inferiority.
Using a global panel on research and development (R&D) expenditures, this paper documents that on average poor countries do far less R&D than rich as a share of GDP. This is arguably counter ...intuitive since the gains from doing the R&D required for technological catch up are thought to be very high and Griffith et al. (2004) have documented that in the OECD returns increase dramatically with distance from the frontier. Exploiting recent advances in instrumental variables in a varying coefficient context we find that the rates of return follow an inverted U: they rise with distance to the frontier and then fall thereafter, potentially turning negative for the poorest countries. The findings provide a new mechanism underlying the twin income peaks – poor countries cannot exploit technological transfer for convergence while middle income countries can converge rapidly to the frontier. The low returns found for poor countries does not diminish the centrality of technological transfer for development, but rather suggests the importance of factors complementary to R&D, such as education, the quality of scientific infrastructure, the overall functioning of the national innovation system, and the quality of the private sector, which become increasingly weak with distance from the frontier and offset the catch up effect.
This paper exploits an extensive Brazilian micro-enterprise survey and the 1996 introduction of a business tax reduction and simplification scheme (SIMPLES) to examine three questions. First, do high ...tax rates and complex tax regulations really constitute a barrier to the formalization of micro-firms? Second, does formalization improve firm performance measured along several dimensions, including revenues, employment and capital stock? Third, what are the channels through which this occurs? We find that SIMPLES led to a significant increase in formality in several dimensions. Moreover, newly created firms that opt for operating formally show higher levels of revenue and profits, employ more workers and are more capital intensive (only for those firms that have employees). The channel through which this occurs is not access to credit or contracts with larger firms. Rather, it appears that the lower cost of contracting labor leads to adopting production techniques that involve a permanent location and a larger paid labor force.
The Persistence of (Subnational) Fortune Maloney, William F.; Valencia Caicedo, Felipe
The Economic journal (London),
December 2016, Volume:
126, Issue:
598
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Using newly collected subnational data, this article establishes the within-country persistence of economic activity in the New World over the last half millennium, a period including the trauma of ...European colonisation, the drastic reduction of native populations and the imposition of potentially growth inhibiting institutions. High pre-colonial density areas tend to be denser today due to locational fundamentals and agglomeration effects: colonialists established settlements near existing native populations for reasons of labour, trade, knowledge and defence. These areas, identified with pre-colonial prosperity, also tend to have higher incomes today suggesting that at the subnational level, fortune persists.
This paper studies the cross-country patterns of risky innovation and growth through the lens of international trade. We use a simple theoretical framework of risky quality upgrading by firms under ...varying levels of financial development to derive two predictions. First, the mean rate of quality growth and the corresponding cross-sectional variance of quality growth in a country are positively correlated. Second, both the mean and variance of quality changes are positively correlated with the country's level of financial development. We then test these two hypotheses using data on disaggregated (HS10) bilateral exports to the United States. The patterns in the data are consistent with the theory. The mean and the variance of quality growth are strongly positively correlated with each other. Countries with greater financial depth are systematically characterized by higher mean and higher variance in the growth of product quality. Our findings suggest a mean-variance trade-off in product quality improvements along the development path. Increases in financial depth do not imply lower variability of changes in the product space.
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