Person:
Gill, Indermit Singh
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Macroeconomics
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Office of the Chief Economist, Europe & Central Asia, World Bank
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Last updated
January 31, 2023
Biography
Indermit Gill is the Chief Economist of the Europe and Central Asia Region of the World Bank. Since joining the World Bank in 1993, he has worked in both the Latin America and East Asia regional offices. He was the director of the 2009 World Development Report, Reshaping Economic Geography, the principal author of Golden Growth: Restoring the Lustre of the European Economic Model, of Keeping the Promise of Social Security in Latin America and of An East Asian Renaissance. Mr. Gill has an M.A. in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago.
Publication Search Results
1 - 10 of 20
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Publication
Crafting Labor Policy : Techniques and Lessons from Latin America
(Washington, DC: World Bank and Oxford University Press, 2002)Nothing impacts the welfare of individuals and households more directly than employment and earnings opportunities. In developing countries, labor market reform is a crucial component for the success of overall economic policy reforms. Despite success in other areas of economic reform over the past ten years, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile continue to face significant labor policy issues. To reduce the rhetoric around the issues - in Argentina, a high level of unemployment exists; in Brazil, the high costs of public employment have created large government deficits and public debt; and in Chile, there is a growing income inequality and uncertainty of employment - the book uses a systematically quantitative approach. The value of the quantitative methods in analysis is that they can provide frameworks to better understand the effects of various policy actions. The results can then be translated into benefits and costs that policy makers can more easily explain to their constituents. The policy recommendations resulting from the issues analyzed in Crafting Labor Policy: Techniques and Lessons from Latin America may be beneficial to other developing countries enacting labor market reforms. -
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Closing the Gap in Education and Technology
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003)This report focuses not only on the gaps facing Latin America in both education and technology, but especially on the interactions between the two. The central premise of the report is that skills and technology interact in important ways, and this relationship is a fundamental reason for the large observed differences in productivity and incomes across countries. This report argues that skills upgrading technological change, and their interaction are major factors behind total factor productivity growth. Skill-biased technological change is indeed being transferred today at faster speeds to LAC countries, as elsewhere. Technological change has been complementary with skill levels in Latin America in the last two decades. It is further estimated that firms have substantially increased the demand for educated workers in the region, particularly workers with tertiary education. This technological transformation appears to be intimately related to patterns of integration in the world economy. Firms in sectors with higher exposure to trade are subject to more competitive pressures. Adopting and adapting more advanced technologies and hiring and training more educated workers is one way to respond to this pressure to become more productive. The increased potential demand for education offers the possibility to accelerate productivity growth in the economy by closing the educational and technological gaps that Latin American countries exhibit with respect to their peers. -
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Public Debt in Developing Countries : Has the Market-Based Model Worked?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-08)Over the past 25 years, significant levels of public debt and external finance are more likely to have enhanced macroeconomic vulnerability than economic growth in developing countries. This applies not just to countries with a history of high inflation and past default, but also to those in East Asia, with a long tradition of prudent macroeconomic policies and rapid growth. The authors examine why with the help of a conceptual framework drawn from the growth, capital flows, and crisis literature for developing countries with access to the international capital markets (market access countries or MACs). They find that, while the chances of another generalized debt crisis have receded since the turbulence of the late 1990s, sovereign debt is indeed constraining growth in MACs, especially those with debt sustainability problems. Several prominent MACs have sought to address the debt and external finance problem by generating large primary fiscal surpluses, switching to flexible exchange rates, and reforming fiscal and financial institutions. Such country-led initiatives completely dominate attempts to overhaul the international financial architecture or launch new lending instruments, which have so far met with little success. While the initial results of the countries' initiatives have been encouraging, serious questions remain about the viability of the model of market-based external development finance. Beyond crisis resolution, which has received attention in the form of the sovereign debt restructuring mechanism, the international financial institutions may need to ramp up their role as providers of stable long-run development finance to MACs instead of exiting from them. -
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Reshaping Economic Geography : Implications for New EU Member States
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2009-04)The ongoing crisis should spur deeper European integration, rather than a return to the nationalism of the past. The World Development Report 2009, reshaping economic geography, spotlights several issues for new European Union (EU) member states. From 1950 to 1990, Eastern Europe was impermeable to the flow of goods, services and ideas from the West, and grew slowly. During the same period, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in fourteen Western European economies grew at three times the pace of Eastern Europe. The drivers of West European growth were market economies, regional cooperation, and global economic integration. The European Economic Community, started by six Western European nations in 1957, continued to increase its membership with the ultimate aim of full economic and monetary integration. After the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1991, the EU10 countries, along with Malta and Cyprus, joined the expanded European Union, an economic zone based on the principles of democracy, markets and the free mobility of goods, capital and labor. The 27country European Union has a combined population of almost 500 million people and accounts for over 30 percent of the world's GDP. But the legacy of division has meant that the EU10 countries lag considerably behind most of the other member states. While the EU10 have brought 123 million people into the European Union, they have reduced its average level of GDP per capita by an estimated 15.6 percent. -
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Keeping the Promise of Old Age Income Security in Latin America
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2004-09)Many Latin American governments have radically restructured their old age income security systems, starting with Chile's 1981 pension reform. The reforms move national pension system from purely social to largely individual responsibility; from risk pooling to individual savings accounts. They maintain reduced public risk pooling features, combined with mandatory and voluntary individual private savings to finance pensions and diversify the risks to adequate income in old age-the multi-pillar approach. -
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Trade Liberalization and Labor Reform in Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1990s
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2002-05)This note synthesizes the findings of research on trade and labor in the region, including World Bank studies on: (i) trade and job quality, (ii) informality, and (iii) labor policies in the region. First, the evidence on the relationship between trade liberalization, macro-restructuring and labor market outcomes during the 1990s is reviewed. Second, labor market rigidities will be analyzed and the extent to which reform efforts facilitated formal employment creation. Finally, based on lessons learned from the 1990s, a new agenda for labor market reform is proposed which reflects more closely the new environment in which Latin American governments now operate. -
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The Middle-Income Trap Turns Ten
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-08)Since we introduced the term “middle-income trap” in 2006, it has become popular among policy makers and researchers. In May 2015, a search of Google Scholar returned more than 3,000 articles including the term and about 300 articles with the term in the title. This paper provides a (non-exhaustive) survey of this literature. The paper then discusses what, in retrospect, we missed when we coined the term. Today, based on developments in East Asia, Latin America, and Central Europe during the past decade, we would have paid more attention to demographic factors, entrepreneurship, and external institutional anchors. We would also make it clearer that to us, the term was as much the absence of a satisfactory theory that could inform development policy in middle-income economies as the articulation of a development phenomenon. Three-quarters of the people in the world now live in middle-income economies, but economists have yet to provide a reliable theory of growth to help policy makers navigate the transition from middle- to high-income status. Hybrids of the Solow-Swan and Lucas-Romer models are not unhelpful, but they are poor substitutes for a well-constructed growth framework. -
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Golden Growth : Restoring the Lustre of the European Economic Model
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2012-04-18)Europe's growth will have to be golden in yet another sense. Economic prosperity has brought to Europeans the gift of longer lives, and the continent's population has aged a lot over the last five decades. Over the next five, it will age even more by 2060; almost a third of Europeans will be older than 65 years. Europe will have to rebuild its structures to make fuller use of the energies and experience of its more mature population's people in their golden years. These desires and developments already make the European growth model distinct. Keeping to the discipline of the golden rule would make it distinguished. This report shows how Europeans have organized the six principal economic activities trade, finance, enterprise, innovation, labor, and government in unique ways. But policies in parts of Europe do not recognize the imperatives of demographic maturity and clash with growth's golden rule. Conforming growth across the continent to Europe's ideals and the iron laws of economics will require difficult decisions. This report was written to inform them. Its findings the changes needed to make trade and finance will not be as hard as those to improve enterprise and innovation; these in turn are not as arduous and urgent as the changes needed to restructure labor and government. Its message the remedies are not out of reach for a part of the world that has proven itself both intrepid and inclusive. -
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Gravity and Friction in Growing East Asia
( 2009)Without the advantages of low wages or high skills, East Asian economies are following a new path of regional integration, led by China. Along this path, policy-makers must manage a migration of 2 million people a month to East Asia's cities, a sharp and unprecedented increase in income inequality, and a growing discontent with corruption as governance structures have been decentralized. Having successfully integrated globally before the financial meltdown of the 1990s, and integrating regionally at an even faster pace since then, East Asia's middle-income countries must now accelerate a third integration, this time at home. Growth based on scale economies and specialization requires managing both gravity and friction. This article outlines what East Asian nations must do to manage these forces even as another financial meltdown is taking place. How well they can do this will determine whether they will grow through middle income to join the ranks of developed economies or not escape the 'middle-income trap'. -
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East Asian Visions : Perspectives on Economic Development
(Washington, DC : World Bank, 2007)East Asian Visions: Perspectives on Economic Development is a collection of essays by 17 eminent East Asians who represent a broad spectrum of backgrounds and experiences. All are senior policy makers, statesmen, or scholars who have either had to deal with or think through some of the most critical financial and developmental issues confronting their countries and the region. Collectively, 10 of them have, at some point in their careers, been at the head of key ministries and central banks; nearly a dozen have been academics and scholars of distinction; several have served as ambassadors to the West and bring a more global strategic perspective; and many have been influential policy advisers and decision makers in governments and international financial agencies. Their essays reflect individual experiences at critical economic junctures and are occasionally quite personal, not surprising since each author selected a topic of his or her own choosing. Given their backgrounds, they have chosen to write about the highly diverse country experiences of East Asia, covering rich, middle income, and poor countries, and they speculate on how their countries fit into a rapidly changing region and globalizing world. Four themes permeate these essays: explaining East Asia's growth and developmental success; the powerful forces of regional integration and building efficiency versus vulnerability; avoiding domestic disintegration given growing public intolerance of increasing inequities, pollution, and corruption; and where will East Asia find its next generation of leaders.