Economics

High-frequency monitoring of food commodity prices is important for assessing and responding to shocks, especially in fragile contexts where timely and targeted interventions for food security are critical. However, national price surveys are typically limited in temporal and spatial granularity. It is cost prohibitive to implement traditional data collection at frequent timescales to unravel spatiotemporal price evolution across market segments and at subnational geographic levels. Recent advancements in data innovation offer promising solutions to address the paucity of commodity price data and guide market intelligence for diverse development stakeholders. The use of artificial intelligen..

This paper examines spillovers in the use of digital technologies from formal to informal businesses by exploring differences in geographic proximity. Using a unique set of geocoded data from the 2019 World Bank Enterprise Surveys in Zambia, the findings indicate that closer geographic proximity to formal firms is associated with a significantly higher likelihood of digital adoption by informal businesses. The finding holds for various types of digital technologies, ranging from computers, tablets, and cell phones to mobile money transactions, and is robust to various measures of geographic proximity and model modifications. The results vary by the owner’s level of education and busin..

Zambia’s private sector must deliver quality jobs at scale to keep up with its expanding working age population, contribute to economic transformation, and reduce poverty. This entails both the creation of high-quality jobs and productivity improvement among existing jobs and firms. This paper analyzes the dynamics of formal firms to identify the drivers and barriers to productivity, formal employment, and formal wage growth in Zambia. Leveraging firm and worker administrative tax data from Zambia, the paper decomposes labor productivity and wage growth among formal firms and workers in Zambia into within-firm, between-firm, inter-sectoral, and dynamic components. The findings show th..

This paper conducts a correspondence study to assess demand for soft skills in the context of hiring discrimination in Malaysia. No evidence of gender-based discrimination is found, including in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics occupations. However, in line with previous studies in the same context, there is evidence of ethnic discrimination. The paper then test the relevance of two soft skills: leadership and teamwork. These tests find some evidence that the labor market rewards simple signals of teamwork for the average applicant. Teamwork also plays an important role in the context of labor market discrimination, reducing the discrimination gap by 40 percent. In contrast,..

The coexistence of several definitions of green jobs and measurement instruments gives room for mismatches between those concepts and their application to research questions. This paper first presents an organizing framework for the existing definitions, measurement instruments, and policy frameworks. It then delves into discussing two appropriate approaches for identifying green occupations to guide skills development policy: the task-content and the skills approaches. In the process, it introduces a novel methodology with a dictionary of green terms for identifying green tasks and occupations. This methodology, utilizing text analysis, demonstrates superior performance compared to the well..

Changes in the sentiment of migration-related news published in destination countries affect the timing of migrants’ journeys to these countries. Using geo-localized data on migrants in Libya and the complete record of news articles in their country of destination, this paper shows that a worsening news sentiment leads to migrants staying longer in Libya, slowing down their journeys to their final destinations. The paper validates these results by showing that the effect is concentrated in locations with internet connections. The results indicate that changes in news sentiment have a significant impact only for some groups of migrants and under specific conditions, suggesting a limite..

This paper, along with its accompanying data, provides the first comprehensive analysis on financing for refugee education in low- and middle-income countries. By compiling and scrutinizing data on host government financing, foreign aid contributions, and philanthropic giving, a consolidated and quantified overview of all major sources of financing for refugee education in low- and middle-income countries is produced. This data is then analyzed to reveal key trends and patterns in refugee education financing, existing financing gaps, and potential biases in financing allocations. These findings are explored in the 10 facts and findings outlined in this paper, and summarized in Box 1 below. I..

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..

Men die at higher rates in nearly all places and at all ages beyond age 45. Using World Health Organization excess mortality estimates by sex and age groups for 75 countries in 2020 and 62 countries in 2021, this paper analyzes how patterns of excess mortality varied by sex and age groups across countries during the COVID-19 pandemic and their association with country income level. In 2020, the pandemic amplified the gender mortality gap for the world, but with variation across countries and by country income level. In high-income countries, rates of excess mortality were much higher for men than women. In contrast, in middle-income countries, the sex ratio of excess mortality was similar to..

Understanding the economic costs attributable to unhealthy diets is crucial to inform health and agrifood investments in low- and middle-income countries experiencing nutrition transition. To review the current evidence on the association between diet quality and economic costs in low- and middle-income countries, this paper first conducted a literature search to identify studies that include a dietary exposure, nutrition, or health outcome, and a cost estimate. Given the limited studies in terms of life stage groups represented, a second search was conducted for systematic reviews and meta-analyses of observational studies, with effect size estimates for the risk of nutrition or health outc..

Can information about the value of diagnostic tests improve provider practice and help patients recognize higher quality of care? In a randomized experiment at public clinics in Mali, health providers and patients received tailored information about the importance of rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) for malaria. The provider training increased provider reliance on RDTs, improving the match between a patient’s malaria status and treatment with antimalarials by 15–30 percent. Nonetheless, patients were significantly less satisfied with the care they received, driven by those whose prior beliefs did not match their true malaria status. The patient information intervention did not aff..

Despite the multitude of measures of multidimensional inequality, none is regularly used in policymaking. This paper proposes multidimensional inequality measures that are easily implementable and transparent and overcome many deficiencies of existing measures. The measures follow a traditional two-stage format, which aggregates dimensions first and then applies a unidimensional measure like the Gini coefficient to the distribution of aggregates. A novel characterization result identifies the precise form of aggregation needed to obtain axiomatically sound measures. The paper derives an additive decomposition formula — breaking down multidimensional inequality into terms reflecting th..

The 2022 Household Income and Expenditure Survey enhances fieldwork, data management, and information quality but poses comparability challenges with previous rounds. This study proposes a two-step process based on statistical matching to fill the information gap in previous survey rounds. This methodology uses the more comprehensive 2022 information to reconstruct comparable consumption measures over time. This allows for a consistent assessment of poverty and inequality measures, providing insights into the changes for policy makers, researchers, and stakeholders over the years. The results reveal that integrating this correction into previous survey rounds would have reduced poverty rates..

Fiscal incidence analysis helps in understanding who contributes to and benefits from the fiscal system, and assessing the impact of fiscal policies in reducing poverty and inequality. Traditionally, the incidence of fiscal policy is assessed for households along the income distribution. In an attempt to tease out the gendered impacts of the fiscal system, this paper instead looks at how much different types of households in Jordan contribute to and benefit from current fiscal policies and the extent to which the fiscal system is helping to equalize post-market outcomes within and across groups. A household typology is constructed for Jordan based on households’ demographic characteri..

Innovative women entrepreneurs can be agents of change and offer novel solutions to global challenges. However, they face multiple barriers to growing their businesses. This paper reviews the literature on strategies to support women entrepreneurs in improving their business outcomes. It focuses on interventions designed to address four areas of constraints that influence their decisions and can impact their business performance: gaps in human capital, access to finance, access to technology and markets, and contextual factors such as legal and regulatory constraints, social norms, access to care, and gender-based violence. The review concludes that evidence of modest average treatment effec..

Do fiscal rules help suppress sovereign spreads during periods of global financial stress? Yes! This paper examines whether fiscal rules contribute to mitigating sovereign spreads in emerging markets and developing economies during periods of heightened financial and economic volatility worldwide. It finds that the presence of fiscal rules is statistically significantly associated with lower sovereign spreads during the COVID-19 crisis — about 350 basis points lower on average. Interestingly, this correlation persists even when nations deviate from these rules, indicating an expectation of post-crisis compliance. The study shows that deviations from fiscal rules are typically short-li..

The Paris Agreement established that global warming should be limited to “well below” 2◦C and encouraged efforts to limit warming to 1.5◦C. Achieving this goal presents a significant challenge, especially given the presence of (i) economic inertia and adjustment costs, which penalize a swift transition away from fossil fuels, and (ii) climate uncertainty that, for example, hinders the ability to predict the amount of emissions that can be emitted before a given temperature target is passed, which is often referred to as the remaining carbon budget. This paper presents a modeling framework that explores optimal decarbonization investment strategy when both delayed ..

There is a rapidly growing literature on the link between climate change and poverty. This study reviews the existing literature on whether the poor are more exposed to climate shocks and whether they are more adversely affected. About two-thirds of the studies in our analyzed sample find that the poor are more exposed to climate shocks than is the rest of the population and four-fifths of the studies find that the poor are more adversely affected by climate shocks than is the rest of the population. Income and human capital losses tend to be concentrated among the poor. These findings highlight the potential long-term risk of a climate-change induced poverty trap and the need for targeted i..

This paper examines the role of firm dynamics in aggregate total factor productivity, job flows, and wage inequality in Ecuador. Utilizing a comprehensive employer-employee dataset, the paper documents firm dynamics and job flow patterns that are consistent with the presence of market distortions. Also, the paper identifies factor misallocation as the main contributor to Ecuador's total factor productivity deceleration. Given these trends, the paper explores allocative inefficiency drivers through firm- and industry-level regressions. Firms in the top productivity quintile face distortive non-wage labor costs that are 3.7 times higher than the bottom quintile, after controlling for firm size..

Uruguay is an economy that is vulnerable to precipitation patterns, as evidenced during the country’s historic 2022/23 drought. Yet, and despite its rich macroeconomic and climate data environment, the country does not have a consistent macroeconomic model to address the aggregate impact of climate shocks, let alone the expected additional impact from climate change. This paper intends to fill this gap by integrating climate shocks into the World Bank’s Macro-Fiscal Model, its workhorse structural macroeconomic projection model. Building on existing country studies on the sectoral effects of droughts and floods, the analysis finds that the volatility of a simulated Uruguayan ec..

This paper examines the relationship between trade and job quality, using productivity and wage rate data for export and non-export activities in a sample of 60 countries across all income levels and 45 sectors spanning the whole economy over 1995–2019. First, the analysis finds that workers involved in export activities are more productive and better paid than those in non-export activities. While the productivity premium for export activities is confirmed in low- and middle-income countries, there is no wage rate premium. Second, this study finds a positive relationship between exports and labor productivity at the country-sector level, which can be attributed to productivity gains ..

Territorial development theory and practice have witnessed significant change in recent times. This change has increasingly put the spatial dimension at the center of development policies. Although agglomeration-focused policies derived from urbanization and agglomeration economics were once prominent, their empirical limitations have become increasingly apparent. Greater territorial polarization and pervasive left-behindedness have underscored the need for a more inclusive territorial development approach, prompting increased interest in understanding and addressing regional disparities to ensure more equitable economic growth. This paper synthesizes the growing interest in territorial deve..

This paper presents evidence of inelastic demand in the market for risky sovereign bonds and examines its interplay with government policies. The methodology combines bond-level evidence with a structural model featuring endogenous bond issuances and default risk. Empirically, the paper exploits monthly changes in the composition of a major bond index to identify flow shocks that shift the available bond supply and are unrelated to country fundamentals. The paper finds that a 1 percentage point reduction in the available supply increases bond prices by 33 basis points. Although exogenous, these shocks might influence government policies and expected bond payoffs. The paper identifies a struc..

The data for estimating monetary poverty in the Syrian Arab Republic are outdated. In the context of data scarcity, this paper aims to propose a methodological approach to address the knowledge gap regarding welfare in Syria over the past decade. In particular, the analysis provides (i) updated pre-conflict poverty baseline estimates based on grouped data from the 2009 Household Income and Expenditure Survey; (ii) supporting evidence on the viability of using Humanitarian Needs Assessment Programme Demographic and Water Supply, Sanitation, and Hygiene 2022 survey data for the estimation of monetary poverty in 2022; and (iii) supporting theoretical and empirical evidence to identify growth in..

Survey data on household consumption are often unavailable or incomparable over time in many low- and middle-income countries. Based on a unique randomized survey experiment implemented in Tanzania, this study offers new and rigorous evidence demonstrating that survey-to-survey imputation can fill consumption data gaps and provide low-cost and reliable poverty estimates. Basic imputation models featuring utility expenditures, together with a modest set of predictors on demographics, employment, household assets, and housing, yield accurate predictions. Imputation accuracy is robust to varying the survey questionnaire length, the choice of base surveys for estimating the imputation model, dif..

Analysing who benefits from different taxes and spending is important to understand how fiscal policy is affecting poverty and inequality in Jordan. This study traces how the Jordanian fiscal system affects different households, while paying income tax and GST and benefiting from social assistance, and services, such as, cash transfers, electricity and water subsidies, education and health. The study finds that Jordan’s current fiscal system is modestly progressive, but more could be achieved. Inequality, as measured by the Gini Index, falls 5.8 points between household market incomes and post-fiscal incomes (after paying income and consumption taxes as well as receiving government tr..

Côte d'Ivoire, the largest economy in the West African Economic and Monetary Union, was hit by COVID-19, which claimed many lives. This paper estimates COVID-19 mortality costs over time using the value of a statistical life. Using a more conservative estimate of the value of a statistical life income elasticity ranging from 1 to 1.4, the overall COVID-19 mortality costs in Côte d'Ivoire since the pandemic range from US$ 100.4 million to US$ 284.3 million. Considering age-related adjustments, a 3 percent discount rate, and a value of a statistical life income elasticity of 1 to 1.4, the COVID-19 costs range from US$ 5.4 million to US$ 15.3 million. Similarly, the COVID-19 mortality..

Fiscal policies affect households and individuals in a variety of ways. Even though these effects are likely to be different for men and women, conventional tools of fiscal incidence analysis are typically unable to capture these gender differences. Using a particular type of incidence analysis known in the literature as the Commitment to Equity framework, this paper proposes a methodology to overcome this challenge. A particular novelty the paper introduces is the explicit incorporation of social reproduction into the fiscal incidence analysis framework, enabling the implicit valuation of unpaid work that is typically undertaken by women on activities such as cooking, cleaning, and caring f..

This paper investigates whether the expansion of fast internet networks complements or substitutes for the development of roads to improve market access and create more and higher-skilled jobs in Africa. The paper combines the geographic locations of households and firms with the locations of main roads and optical-fiber nodes in 25 Sub-Saharan African countries. Using the difference-in-differences and instrumental variables approaches and leveraging the history of post-independence road building and the timing of the arrival of submarine internet, the paper examines the impacts of access to these two types of infrastructure, both in isolation and in combination. The findings show that impro..

The Global Compact on Refugees recognizes the importance of responsibility sharing for hosting, protecting, and assisting refugees, while emphasizing the potential of economic participation to reduce the cost of humanitarian assistance. This note explores the relative importance of aid in caring for refugees hosted in Chad and the importance of the incomes earned by the refugees. It finds that the combination of aid and self-earned incomes falls far short of a minimum standard of living (the poverty line) as a consequence of which the vast majority of refugees lives in abject poverty. It is also finds that although refugees are hosted in camps with relatively few economic opportunities, self..