NBER Working Papers by Poonam Gupta

While India is distinctive among developing countries for its fast-growing service sector, sceptics have raised doubts about the quality and sustainability of this service-sector growth and its implications for economic development. We show, consistent with the views of the sceptics, that while growth of the sector has been unusually rapid, it started 15 years ago from unusually low levels. That the share of services has now simply converged to the international norm raises questions about whether it will continue growing rapidly. In particular, whether service-sector output and employment continue to grow in excess of international norms will depend on the continued expansion of modern services (business services, communication and banking) but, also, on the application of modern infor...

The positive association between the service sector share of output and per capita income is one of the best-known regularities in all of growth and development economics. Yet there is less than complete agreement on the nature of that association. Here we identify two waves of service sector growth, a first wave in countries with relatively low levels of per capita GDP and a second wave in countries with higher per capita incomes. The first wave appears to be made up primarily of traditional services, the second wave of modern (financial, communication, computer, technical, legal, advertising and business) services that are receptive to the application of information technologies and increasingly tradable across borders. In addition, there is evidence of the second wave occurring at lowe...

Could a high-access, quick-disbursing %u201Cinsurance facility%u201D in the IMF help to reduce the incidence of sharp interruptions in capital flows (%u201Csudden stops%u201D)? We contribute to the debate on this question by analyzing the impact of conventional IMF-supported programs on the incidence of sudden stops. Correcting for the non-random assignment of programs, we find that sudden stops are fewer and generally less severe when an IMF arrangement exists and that this form of %u201Cinsurance%u201D works best for countries with strong fundamentals. In contrast there is no evidence that a Fund-supported program attenuates the output effects of capital account reversals if these nonetheless occur.