Statistics

Area-based and household-based targeting have been widely implemented to allocate resources for program implementation. The efficiency and equity consequences of this targeting choice depend on whether intervention needs are primarily shared within locations or vary substantially across neighboring households within a community. This paper develops a diagnostic approach that compares out-of-sample predictive accuracy from area-based, household-based, and hybrid models to identify households in need. Using a survey of about 5,000 households in coastal Bangladesh, this paper finds heterogeneity across climate adaptation needs. Self-reported infrastructure needs are spatially concentrated, whil..

The World Bank uses a population threshold of 1.5 million as the operational reference point for its Small States classification, with implications across several financing frameworks. This paper asks whether there is a break at the threshold in the macroeconomic outcomes associated with small country size, and how the classification rule should be administered given that population estimates are revised. In cross-country data for emerging market and developing economies over 2000–24, growth volatility, trade openness, and terms-of-trade volatility decline smoothly with population size across regression, nonparametric, and threshold-test evidence, with no detectable break at 1.5 million or..

This study examines how diaspora communities affect foreign direct investment flowing into Economic Community of West African States countries. It uses data on international migration to represent the size of the diaspora and estimates their savings. The analysis covers 14 countries from 2005 to 2020, using system generalized method of moments and feasible generalized least squares methods. The study finds that members of the diaspora living in Europe help bring more foreign direct investment to their home countries, while the diaspora in Asia has a smaller and sector-specific effect, helping attract foreign direct investment in extractive industries. The diaspora in North America has little..

Cost-effective and scalable soil testing tools can play an instrumental role in guiding agricultural decisions and policies, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, where declining soil fertility poses a serious threat to productivity. Laboratory tests of soil samples, which provide the most accurate measures of soil properties, remain costly and challenging to scale in the context of national surveys or programs. To test and validate alternative approaches to soil measurement, the World Bank launched the Uganda Climate, Land Area, and Soil Study project. This paper evaluates the accuracy and scalability of three soil testing tools (the AgroCares Scanner, the Palintest kit, and the Sonkir pH met..

Tax havens weaken tax enforcement by obscuring firm ownership and facilitating offshore evasion. This paper studies a reform in Ecuador that imposed a corporate tax surcharge on firms with owners in tax havens, using a newly available ownership registry. Comparing haven-owned firms to other foreign-owned firms, the analysis finds that the reform reduced haven ownership by 12 percentage points, largely through disclosure of non-haven individual owners. Exposed firms reduced transactions with tax havens and increased corporate tax payments, with no detectable effects on investment or firm size. The results suggest that ownership transparency can meaningfully improve tax compliance at limited e..

Multifaceted poverty Graduation programs that aim to increase income generating activities for low-income households are being rapidly adopted and scaled by nonprofit organizations and governments. This paper conducts a Bayesian hierarchical meta-analysis of 49 studies (encompassing 81 treatment variations) on poverty Graduation programs, defined as containing at least three of five components: consumption support, savings facilitation, skills training, coaching, and a lump-sum transfer. The analysis finds large gains across economic and psychosocial outcomes: monthly consumption rises by 38 USD PPP (11 percent), income by 28 USD PPP (15 percent), alongside improvements in savings, assets, f..

Even as governments push to build infrastructure to achieve universal access to electricity, demand-side barriers constrain uptake where infrastructure already exists. This paper assess the impact of the quasi-experimental introduction of mobile money on electricity adoption by households. Leveraging a cross-country panel of 180 non-Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, it first employs a heterogeneous difference-in-differences estimator to document a significant and positive association between mobile money introduction and electrification, particularly in rural areas. The global analysis is complemented with a granular district-level analysis of 33 sub-Sa..

This paper surveys the evidence on the role of education in reducing poverty. Education can reduce absolute poverty by increasing productivity, relative poverty by lowering inequality, and multidimensional poverty by improving dimensions of well-being beyond income. Existing research indicates that it contributes to all three. Returns to schooling are large, especially for policies enabling children from disadvantaged backgrounds to acquire more education, and typically exceed the costs of education provision. Education also benefits low-wage workers through labor market spillovers: reducing the share of low-skilled workers in the economy raises their relative wage. The expansion of educatio..

In January 2022, Colombia moved nearly two million Venezuelan migrants from emergency care alone to full health coverage. Mortality fell among Colombians, who were already insured.

Em janeiro de 2022, a Colômbia ampliou a cobertura de saúde plena para quase dois milhões de migrantes venezuelanos, antes limitados ao atendimento de emergência. A mortalidade dos colombianos, que já contavam com cobertura, diminuiu.

En enero de 2022, Colombia pasó a casi dos millones de migrantes venezolanos de la atencion de urgencias a la cobertura plena. Cayó la mortalidad de los colombianos, que ya tenían seguro.

En janvier 2022, la Colombie a ouvert une couverture santé complète à près de deux millions de migrants vénézuéliens limités aux urgences. La mortalité des Colombiens, déjà assurés, a baissé.

Shallow financial markets may act as an important structural constraint on a country’s ability to mobilize tax revenues. This paper explores this hypothesis in the context of Indonesia, a middle-income country with persistently low tax collections and low financial sector depth. At the macro level, relating cross-country financial development to new estimates of tax gaps, it finds that a 1 percent increase in private credit as a share of GDP could reduce the tax gap by approximately 0.2 percent. At the micro level, analysis of publicly listed Indonesian companies suggests that a one-decile increase in financial constraints is associated with a 0.18 percentage point drop in cash effective t..

This paper studies how investor–State dispute settlement (ISDS) affects foreign direct investment (FDI) by examining countries’ membership in the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) and their first ISDS cases. Using a Poisson Pseudo–Maximum Likelihood (PPML) event-study estimator and newly compiled data, ICSID membership is shown to be associated with a substantial increase in bilateral investment, while a first ISDS case has no statistically significant effect. The results are not driven by simultaneous proliferation of bilateral investment treaties or other confounding events.