Since the turn of the century, overall economic growth in Nigeria has been consistently strong—averaging around 5.4 percent per year, up substantially from about 2.0 percent during 1990–2000. Moreover, overall GDP growth in the past decade is even…
The first decade of the 21st century was extraordinarily good for developing countries and their mostly poor citizens. Their economies expanded at unprecedented rates, resulting in both a large reduction in extreme poverty and a significant expansion…
IIndia’s economy today is much larger than what it was half a century ago, with most of that growth occurring since the early 1990s—an indication that it has flourished in the postglobalization phase. Since 1991, GDP growth has averaged 6 percent,…
Throughout the course of only a few decades in the postwar period, the Brazilian economy experienced an intense and fast process of industrialization, which went hand in hand with a major increase in labor productivity and periods of annual growth…
In 1966 when Botswana gained independence, it was one of the poorest countries in the world. But by 1986, Botswana had achieved middle-income status, and in 2005, the World Bank classified it as an upper-middle-income country. The only other country…
During the past 20 years, Viet Nam underwent an economic transformation, featuring high rates of economic growth—real GDP increased at an average annual growth rate of 7 percent from 1986 to 2008 and GDP per capita in PPP terms tripled—and a sharp…
Each country has its own story of how it developed, but at the regional level, some stark patterns stand out. For Asia, the development path was rather traditional, with the decline of agriculture and the rise of manufacturing (that is,…
Long considered the archetype of economic decline in Africa, Zambia more recently has been heralded as an example of Africa’s economic resurgence.
The volume consists of an overview and seven country studies, written by leading scholars from both developed and developing countries. The overview lays out a unifying framework for thinking about economic growth as a combination of two challenges.…
Can developing countries use industrialization, as the East Asian economies did, to try to catch up with the high-income countries? Structural Change, Fundamentals, and Growth says the answer is likely to be “no.” Rather, they will need to chart a new…