World Bank Document

The Middle-Income Trap Turns Ten 
Indermit S. Gill 
and 
Homi Kharas 
Paper presented at the 37
th
PAFTAD Conference, Singapore, June 3-5, 2015. Indermit Gill is the Director 
for Development Policy in The Office of the Chief Economist of the World Bank. Homi Kharas is Senior 
Fellow at the Brookings Institution. The authors are grateful to the participants at the conference, especially 
Cassey Lee and James Riedel, for constructive comments. We would like to thank Kamil Pruchnik, Naotaka 
Sugawara and Lorenz Noe for their help in writing the paper. 

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1
Contents 
The Origins of the Middle-Income Trap
 
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1
The Middle-Income Trap Since 2005
 
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5
Definitions and Evidence
 
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7
Middle-Income Transitions
 
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11
What We Got Right, and What We Missed
 
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14
Concluding Remarks
 
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19
Bibliography