Person:
Lin, Justin Yifu

Last updated January 31, 2023

Biography

Justin Yifu Lin is the former World Bank Chief Economist and Senior Vice President, Development Economics. In his capacity, Mr. Lin guided the Bank’s intellectual leadership and played a key role in shaping the economic research agenda of the institution. Building on a distinguished career as one of China’s leading economists, Mr. Lin is undertaking an ambitious research program that examines the industrialization of rapidly developing countries and sheds new light on the causes of lagging growth in poor regions. He took up his World Bank position on June 2, 2008, after serving for 15 years as Professor and Founding Director of the China Centre for Economic Research (CCER) at Peking University.

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 48

Shifting Patterns of Economic Growth and Rethinking Development

(Taylor and Francis, 2012-07-30) Lin, Justin Yifu ; Rosenblatt, David

This paper provides an historical overview of both the evolution of the economic performance of the developing world and the evolution of economic thought on development policy. The twentieth century was broadly characterized by divergence between high-income countries and the developing world, with only a limited number (less than 10% of the economies in the world) managing to progress out of lower or middle-income status to high-income status. The last decade witnessed a sharp reversal from a pattern of divergence to convergence – particularly for a set of large middle-income countries. The latter phenomenon was also driven by increasing economic ties among developing countries and, on the intellectual scale, increased knowledge generation and sharing among the developing countries. Re-thinking development policy implies confronting these realities: twentieth century economic divergence, the experience of the handful of success stories, and the recent rise of the multi-polar growth world. This paper provides descriptive data and a literature survey to document these trends.
Explaining Africa's (Dis)advantage

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-01) Harrison, Ann E. ; Lin, Justin Yifu ; Xu, L. Colin

Africa's economic performance has been widely viewed with pessimism. In this paper, firm-level data for around 80 countries are used to examine formal firm performance. Without controls, manufacturing African firms perform significantly worse than firms in other regions. They have lower productivity levels and growth rates, export less, and have lower investment rates. Once geography, political competition and the business environment are controlled for, formal African firms lead in productivity levels and growth. Africa's conditional advantage is higher in low-tech than in high-tech manufacturing, and exists in manufacturing but not in services. The key factors explaining Africa's disadvantage at the firm level are lack of infrastructure, access to finance, and political competition.
Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics--Global 2008 : Private Sector and Development

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2009) Lin, Justin Yifu ; Pleskovic, Boris ; Lin, Justin Yifu ; Pleskovic, Boris

The Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics (ABCDE) is a leading forum for advanced, forward-looking research on important development issues. Each year, the ABCDE brings policy makers and politicians together with researchers from academe, international organizations, and think tanks. The diverse perspectives of the international development community mingle and coalesce through in-depth debates on important themes on the development agenda. The 2008 ABCDE was devoted to the theme 'the private sector and development' and highlighted such issues as financial inclusion, key factors in the business climate, and the provision of public services by non-state actors.
China and the Global Economy

(Taylor and Francis, 2011-10-07) Lin, Justin Yifu

As a result of the extraordinary performance in the past 20 years, China's status in the global economy has dramatically changed. In this article, I reflect on China's unprecedented growth, examine the reasons for that growth, and discuss promising prospects for the Chinese economy to maintain an 8% annual growth rate in the coming two decades. Although to maintain that growth rate, China will definitely encounter many challenges – both internally and externally. The twenty-first century has witnessed the emergence of a multi-polar growth world, with many of the new growth poles being emerging market economies. China has become the top contributor to global GDP growth in the decade of 2000–2009. If China copes appropriately with its challenges and deepens its structural reforms, it has the potential to continue its role as a leading power in supporting a multi-polar global economic architecture that benefits both developing and high-income countries in various ways.
New Structural Economics : A Framework for Rethinking Development

(World Bank, 2011-08-01) Lin, Justin Yifu

As strategies for achieving sustainable growth in developing countries are re-examined in light of the financial crisis, it is critical to take into account structural change and its corollary, industrial upgrading. Economic literature has devoted a great deal of attention to the analysis of technological innovation, but not enough to these equally important issues. The new structural economics outlined in this paper suggests a framework to complement previous approaches in the search for sustainable growth strategies. It takes the following into consideration. First, an economy's structure of factor endowments evolves from one level of development to another. Therefore, the optimal industrial structure of a given economy will be different at different levels of development. Each industrial structure requires corresponding infrastructure (both “hard” and “soft”) to facilitate its operations and transactions. Second, each level of economic development is a point along the continuum from a low-income agrarian economy to a high-income industrialized economy, not a dichotomy of two economic development levels (“poor” versus “rich” or “developing” versus “industrialized”). Industrial upgrading and infrastructure improvement targets in developing countries should not necessarily draw from those that exist in high-income countries. Third, at each given level of development, the market is the basic mechanism for effective resource allocation. However, economic development as a dynamic process requires industrial upgrading and corresponding improvements in “hard” and “soft” infrastructure at each level. Such upgrading entails large externalities to firms' transaction costs and returns to capital investment. Thus, in addition to an effective market mechanism, the government should play an active role in facilitating industrial upgrading and infrastructure improvements."
Explaining Africa’s (Dis)advantage : The Curse of Party Monopoly

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-01) Harrison, Ann E. ; Lin, Justin Yifu ; Xu, L. Colin

Africa's economic performance has been widely viewed with pessimism. This paper uses firm-level data for 89 countries to examine formal firm performance. Without controls, manufacturing African firms do not perform much worse than firms in other regions. But they do have structural problems, exhibiting much lower export intensity and investment rates. Once the analysis controls for geography and the political and business environment, formal African firms robustly lead in sales growth, total factor productivity levels and productivity growth. Africa's conditional advantage is higher in low-tech than in high-tech manufacturing, and exists in manufacturing but not in services. While geography, infrastructure, and access to finance play an important role in explaining Africa's disadvantage in firm performance, the key factor is party monopoly. The longer a single political party remains in power, the lower are firm productivity levels, growth rates, and sales growth for manufacturing. In contrast, the business environment and firm characteristics (except for foreign investment) do not matter as much. The paper also finds evidence that the effects of the political and business environment are heterogeneous across sectors and firms of various levels of technology.
The Rejuvenation of Industrial Policy

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-09) Stiglitz, Joseph E. ; Lin, Justin Yifu ; Monga, Célestin

This essay is about an important area in which there has been major rethinking -- industrial policy, by which the authors mean government policies directed at affecting the economic structure of the economy. The standard argument was that markets were efficient, so there was no need for government to intervene either in the allocation of resources across sectors or in the choices of technique. And even if markets were not efficient, governments were not likely to improve matters. But the 2008-2009 global financial crisis showed that markets were not necessarily efficient and, indeed, there was a broad consensus that without strong government intervention -- which included providing lifelines to certain firms and certain industries -- the market economies of the United States and Europe may have collapsed. Today, the relevance and pertinence of industrial policies are acknowledged by mainstream economists and political leaders from all sides of the ideological spectrum. But what exactly is industrial policy? Why has it raised so much controversy and confusion? What is the compelling new rationale that seems to bring mainstream economists to acknowledge the crucial importance of industrial policy and revisit some of the fundamental assumptions of economic theory and economic development? How can industrial policy be designed to avoid the pitfalls of some of the seeming past failures and to emulate some of the past successes? What are the contours of the emerging consensus and remaining issues and open questions? The paper addresses these questions.
Leading Dragon Phenomenon : New Opportunities for Catch-up in Low-Income Countries

(Asian Development Bank and Asian Development Bank Institute, 2013-03) Chandra, Vandana ; Lin, Justin Yifu ; Wang, Yan

Modern economic development is accompanied by the structural transformation from an agrarian to an industrial economy. Since the 18th century, all countries that industrialized successfully have followed their comparative advantages and leveraged the latecomer advantage, including emerging market economies such as the People's Republic of China (PRC), India, and Indonesia. The current view is that Chinese dominance in manufacturing hinders poor countries from developing similar industries. We argue that rising labor cost is causing the PRC to graduate from labor-intensive to more capital-intensive and technology-intensive industries. This will result in the relocation of low-skill manufacturing jobs to other low-wage countries. This process, which we call the “leading dragon phenomenon,” offers an unprecedented opportunity to low-income countries. Such economies can seize this opportunity by attracting the rising outward foreign direct investment flowing from Brazil, the PRC, India, and Indonesia into the manufacturing sectors. All low-income countries can compete for the jobs spillover from the PRC and other emerging economies, but the winner must implement credible economic development strategies that are consistent with its comparative advantage.
Learning from China's Rise to Escape the Middle-Income Trap : A New Structural Economics Approach to Latin America

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-08) Lin, Justin Yifu ; Treichel, Volker

This paper discusses the causes of the middle-income trap in Latin America and the Caribbean, identifies the challenges and opportunities for Latin America that come from China's rise, and draws lessons from New Structural Economics and the Growth Identification and Facilitation Framework to help Latin America escape the middle-income trap. Countries in Latin America and the Caribbean are caught in a middle-income trap due to their inability to structurally upgrade from low value-added to high value-added products. Governments in Latin America and the Caribbean should intervene in industries in which they have a comparative advantage, calibrating supporting policies in close collaboration with the private sector through public-private sector alliances. Through continuous structural upgrading in sectors intensive in factors such as natural resources, scientific knowledge, and unskilled labor, the region could achieve dynamic growth. This would require investments in education, research and development, and physical infrastructure. Therefore, industrial upgrading and diversification would be essential to avoid further de-industrialization arising from the competitive pressures of the rise of China, broaden the base for economic growth, and create the basis for further sustained reduction in unemployment, poverty and income inequality. Failure to do so would lead to a loss of competitiveness and risks of further de-industrialization.
Demystifying China’s Fiscal Stimulus

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-10) Fardoust, Shahrokh ; Lin, Justin Yifu ; Luo, Xubei

China's government economic stimulus package in 2008-09 appears to have worked well. It seems to have been about the right size, included a number of appropriate components, and was well timed. Its subnational component was designed to maximize the impact of the stimulus package on the economy and minimize the potential procyclical elements that are usually built into subnational fiscal mechanisms in federal countries. Moreover, China's massive fiscal stimulus played an important role in the overall recovery of the global economy. Using a simple analytical framework, this paper focuses on two key factors behind the success of the stimulus: investments in bottleneck-easing infrastructure projects and countercyclical nature of subnational spending based on the assumption that well-chosen infrastructure projects could improve business climate and thereby crowd in the private investment. The paper concludes that the expansionary subnational government spending played a key role in strengthening the overall impact of the stimulus and sustaining growth. It also highlights the importance of public investment quality and cautions about the sustainability of local government financing through the domestic banking system and increases in local governments off balance sheet or contingent liabilities. These lessons may be of particular relevance today for China, as well as other countries, in formulating policy response to another global economic slowdown or crisis, possibly as a result of the Eurozone turmoil. For China, investing in urban infrastructure and green economy, as well as in higher quality and better targeted social services, will be crucial for improving income inequality and inducing a more inclusive growth path.