The evidence from individual cases and from cross-country analysis supports the view that globalization leads to faster growth and poverty reduction in poor countries.

Several recent papers have attempted to identify the partial effects of trade integration and institutional quality on long-run growth using the geographical determinants of trade and the historical determinants of institutions as instruments. Dollar and Kraay show that many of the specifications in these papers are weakly identified despite the apparently good performance of the instruments in first-stage regressions. Consequently, they argue that the cross-country variation in institutions, trade, and their geographical and historical determinants is not very informative about the partial effects of these variables on long-run growth.This paper - a product of Investment Climate, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to study institutions and development.

Based on a survey that we designed and that covers a stratified random sample of 12,400 firms in 120 cities in China with firm-level accounting information for 2002-2004, this paper examines the presence of systematic distortions in capital allocation that result in uneven marginal returns to capital across firm ownership, regions, and sectors. It provides a systematic comparison of investment efficiency among wholly and partially state-owned, wholly and partially foreignowned, and domestic privately owned firms, conditioning on their sector, location, and size characteristics. It finds that even after a quarter-of-century of reforms, state-owned firms still have significantly lower returns to capital, on average, than domestic private or foreign-owned firms. Similarly, certain regions and sectors have consistently lower returns to capital than other regions and sectors. By our calculation, if China succeeds in allocating its capital more efficiently, it could reduce its investment intensity by 5 percent of GDP without sacrificing its economic growth (and hence deliver a greater improvement to its citizens' living standard).

A collaborative effort by Western specialists and some of Taiwan's leading social scientists, this timely study addresses the cause and effects of Taiwan's dramatic achievements in economic growth and income distribution as a market-oriented yet highly government-interventionist economy. The relevance of this success could not be more telling for other market-oriented economies as well as for the rapidly decentralizing economies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and China. Using a case-study approach, the contributors examine the transition to export-led growth, foreign trade, investment patterns, the role of financial institutions, fiscal and monetary policy, the educational and agrarian systems, and the role of women and ideology.

Examines the claim that deindustrialization in the US is causing a decline in its competitiveness, especially in view of competition from Germany and Japan. Discusses the relationship between productivity growth in individual industries and the tendency for aggregate productivity levels to converge among OECD countries, and identifies the sources of productivity growth. Looks at the relationship between international trade and productivity convergence in OECD countries and whether the same mechanics of convergence are apparent in developing countries.

Drawing on recently completed firm-level surveys in Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Honduras, India, Nicaragua, Pakistan, and Peru, Dollar, Hallward-Driemeier, and Mengistae investigate the relationship between investment climate and international integration. These standardized surveys of large, random samples of firms in common sectors reveal how firms experience bottlenecks and delays in hard infrastructure such as power and telecommunications, as well as in soft infrastructure such as customs administration. The authors focus primarily on measures of the time or monetary cost of different bottlenecks (such as days to clear goods through customs, days to get a telephone line, and sales lost to power outages). For many of these costs, the obstacles are lower in China than in the South Asian or Latin American countries. There is also systematic variation across cities within countries. The authors estimate a probit function for the probability that a randomly chosen firm is foreign-invested and a separate probit for the probability that a randomly chosen firm is an exporter. These measures of international integration are higher where investment climate is favorable. For locations to take advantage of opportunities in the international market, they need good infrastructure and a sound regulatory environment. The interaction of openness and sound investment climate creates a good environment for investment and production. This paper helps explain why China has been so successful over the past decade, both in terms of integration and of rapid growth, while other countries have had varied success. This paper--a joint product of the Office of the Senior Vice President and Chief Economist, Development Economics, and Investment Climate, Development Research Group--is part of a larger effort in the Bank to understand better the role of business environment in economic performance.

China in the past few years has emerged as a net foreign creditor on the international scene with net foreign assets slightly greater than zero percent of wealth. This is surprising given that China is a relatively poor country with a capital-labor ratio about one-fifth the world average and one-tenth the U.S. level. The main questions that the authors address are whether it makes economic sense for China to be a net creditor and how they see China's net foreign asset position evolving over the next 20 years. They calibrate a theoretical model of international capital flows featuring diminishing returns, production risk, and sovereign risk. The calibrations for China yield a predicted net foreign asset position of -17 percent of China's wealth. The authors also estimate nonstructural cross-country regressions of determinants of net foreign assets in which China is always a significant outlier with 5 to 7 percentage points more of net foreign assets relative to wealth than is predicted by its characteristics. China's extensive capital controls can explain why its current net foreign asset position is far away from what is predicted by open-economy models and cross-country empirics. It seems reasonable to assume that China's international financial integration will increase over time. The authors calibrate and predict different scenarios out to 2025. These scenarios are necessarily speculative, but it is interesting that they typically imply negative net foreign asset positions between 3 and 9 percent of wealth. What may be counter-intuitive for many policymakers is that successful institutional reform and productivity growth are likely to lead to more negative net foreign asset positions than occurs with stagnation. Starting from China's zero net foreign assets position, it would take current account deficits in the range of 2-5 percent of GDP to reach any of these net foreign assets positions. These are not unreasonable deficits, but they require a large adjustment from the present 6 percent of GDP current account surplus.

The "rise of Asia" is something of a myth. During 1990-2005 China accounted for 28 percent of global growth, measured at purchasing power parity (PPP). India accounted for 9 percent. The rest of developing Asia, with nearly a billion people, accounted for only 7 percent, the same as Latin America. Hence there is no general success of Asian developing economies. China has grown better than its developing neighbors because it started its reform with a better base of human capital, has been more open to foreign trade and investment, and created good investment climates in coastal cities. China's success changes the equation going forward: its wages are now two to three times higher than in the populous Asian countries (Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Vietnam), and China will become an ever-larger importer of natural resource and labor-intensive products. Developing countries need to become more open and improve their investment climates to benefit from these opportunities. China itself faces new challenges that could hamper its further development: unsustainable trade imbalance with the United States, energy and water scarcity and unsustainable use of natural resources, and growing inequality and social tension. To address the first two of these challenges, good cooperation between China and the United States is essential. The author concludes that we are more likely to be facing a "multi-polar century," than an Asian century

Globalization - the growing integration of economies and societies around the world, is a complex process. The focus of this research is the impact of economic integration on developing countries and especially the poor people living in these countries. Whether economic integration supports poverty reduction and how it can do so more effectively are key questions asked. The research yields 3 main findings with bearings on current policy debates about globalization. Firstly, poor countries with some 3 billion people have broken into the global market for manufactures and services, and this successful integration has generally supported poverty reduction. Secondly, inclusion both across countries and within them is important as a number of countries (pop. 2 billion) are failing as states, trading less and less, and becoming marginal to the world economy. Thirdly, standardization or homogenization is a concern - will economic integration lead to cultural or institutional homogenization?