Leveraging Growth Regressions for Country Analysis

This paper shows how growth regressions can be useful for analyzing a country’s growth performance. Growth regressions describe changes in key macroeconomic variables that countries typically experience during their growth process. Such partial correlations facilitate comparative analysis, can usually be linked to policies, and can hence be informative from a policy perspective. Against this background, the paper introduces a new data set of growth correlates spanning more than 150 countries from 1970 to 2019. Additionally, it presents several econometric reference models and details their application for country-level growth analysis. Two distinct metrics highlight infrastructure and human capital as exhibiting the strongest correlations with growth.