A developing countries, India’s growth experience during the past five decades has been unique. Unlike many of its East and Southeast Asian neighbors, India did not grow at “miracle” rates that exceeded 6 percent and reached as high as 10 percent. Nor, unlike Africa and Latin America, did it suffer periods of prolonged stagnation or decline. For three of the five decades (1950–80), India’s econ...

The Asia Pacific region, and especially East Asia, has experienced rapid economic integration without the ‘hard politics’ of legally binding economic and political treaties, unlike Europe where integration has been institution-led. The ‘soft politics’ and market-led integration in East Asia set against a background of political tensions and rivalries in key relationships in the region. The pape...

This paper reviews Brazil’s growth performance over the last quarter of a century and discusses the main determinants of a pick-up in growth since the mid-1990s. Emphasis is placed on the policy pay-offs associated with a consolidation of macroeconomic adjustment, which is a pre-condition for sustained growth. Structural reform based on a liberalization of the county’s trade and investment regi...

A well-developed theoretical literature - dating back at least to Nordhaus (1969) - has analyzed optimal patent policy design. We re-present the core trade-off of the Nordhaus model and highlight an empirical question which emerges from the Nordhaus framework as a key input into optimal patent policy design: namely, what is the elasticity of R&D investment with respect to the patent term? We th...

International openness via the pursuit of liberal trade and investment policies has become one of the conventional verities of the policy advice handed out by multilateral institutions over the past two decades. Greater international integration is now widely regarded as a pre-requisite for improved economic performance and higher per capita incomes, with the former intellectual consensus that ...

Among all the newly industrializing countries, South Korea’s development strategies, as implemented during the period of export-driven industrialization (1962-80), stand out as a model case in which rapid industrialization has been achieved by means of articulate trade and industrial policies. This paper, taking the historical perspective, critically examines the country’s industrial policies a...

This paper argues that the large reduction in corporate tax rates and only gradual widening of tax bases in many countries over the last decades are consistent with tougher international competition for foreign direct investment (FDI). To make this point we develop a model in which governments compete for FDI using corporate tax rates and tax bases. The model’s predictions regarding the slope o...