Statistics

New data from the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law project shed light on the gender dimensions of taxation and public spending—two key fiscal policy tools that impact economic growth and poverty reduction. This working paper presents new cross-country evidence and descriptive insights drawn from both binding legal frameworks (laws and regulations) and supportive policy instruments (such as budget circulars, guidelines, and institutional mechanisms). Together, these data establish a global baseline for assessing how gender dimensions are embedded in fiscal systems. The data presented in this working paper are current as of December 31, 2024, and cover 81 economies for taxation and..

Over the past two decades, many emerging markets and developing economies have been viewed as increasingly resilient to external financial shocks. This paper assesses whether such resilience is broadly shared across emerging markets and developing economies by classifying them into three tiers based on economic size, income level, institutional strength, and financial integration. The analysis shows that first-tier emerging markets and developing economies have improved their external balance sheets and reduced dependence on official support. However, second- and third-tier emerging markets and developing economies have experienced growing external vulnerabilities since the global financial ..

This paper estimates growth-maximizing levels of public capital and investment across countries using a structural framework that accounts for three critical features: public investment efficiency, human capital levels, and congestion effects. A harmonized panel data set covering 166 countries over 1960–2024 was assembled to estimate public capital output elasticities for the entire sample and for countries clustered by income group. These estimates are used to calibrate an endogenous growth model yielding closed-form expressions for the optimal public investment-to-output ratio. The analysis finds a public capital output elasticity of around 0.20, which implies that countries invest sligh..

The Global Biodiversity Framework adopted at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference set a target to protect 30 percent of the world’s land and sea areas by 2030. This paper evaluates the potential contribution of the 30x30 initiative to biodiversity conservation by examining its implications for species that are endemic or occupy very small habitats. Using more than 600,000 species occurrence maps derived from Global Biodiversity Information Facility data—substantially expanding representation for plants and invertebrates—the study develops high-resolution, country-specific templates that identify priority-ordered protected areas optimized for cost-effective species coverage. Each ..

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the literature on how legal frameworks, regulations, and rights influence women’s economic opportunities. Drawing on the Women, Business and the Law 2024 framework as a reference point, the paper adopts a life cycle approach to examine how legal frameworks and policies shape women’s roles as economic actors across different stages of their working lives. It highlights strong evidence showing that the abolition or reform of gender-discriminatory laws can enhance women's economic empowerment by shifting both legal constraints and embedded social norms, although the magnitude and nature of these effects vary across contexts. Persistent gaps are ..

Mental health conditions are strongly associated with reduced labor market participation, but the underlying channels through which such conditions impact labor supply remain unclear. This paper reports on a two-phase study decomposing this relationship by examining (i) job take-up decisions; (ii) labor supply, output, and earning conditional on job take-up; and (iii) quit rates. In Phase 1, women in rural Ghana were asked whether they would be willing to take up a cash-for-work job during the lean season when alternative work is scarce. The findings show that individuals with depression and anxiety, which are common in this population, are much more likely to decline work offers outside the..

Cash transfers are a cornerstone of social protection. This paper evaluates an integrated program in Burkina Faso that combines cash transfers with parenting interventions delivered through group meetings or home visits. In a randomized experiment across 225 villages, households received cash alone; cash plus information on child health and development; or cash, information, and home visits reinforcing the information. Fifteen months after treatment ended, households receiving all three components had fewer pregnancies, more medically assisted births, improved health behaviors, and better educational outcomes. Adding home visits is essential for enhancing child development., Cash alone or wi..

Environmental Engel curves characterize the relationship between the embodied environmental impact of household consumption choices and their respective income levels. Using detailed microdata from 109 countries across all income levels, this paper studies household expenditure shares on 11 fuel types that differ in their air pollution intensity. The findings show that wealthier households tend to shift away from dirty fuels and toward cleaner ones, although this transition is not guaranteed. In low-income countries, limited infrastructure and poor access to clean fuels slow this process, demonstrating that income alone cannot drive energy transitions. By documenting systematic variation in ..

Public procurement is highly susceptible to corruption, especially in developing countries. Although open auctions are widely adopted to curb it, this paper finds that corruption remains prevalent even within this procurement format. Procurement officers can collaborate with firms to manipulate scoring rules, ensuring predetermined winners, while corrupt firms submit noncompetitive bids to meet minimum bidder requirements. Using extensive data from Chinese public procurement auctions, the paper introduces model-driven statistical tools to detect such corruption, identifying a corruption rate of 65 percent. A procurement expert audit survey confirms the tools’ reliability, with a 91 percent..

Foreign direct investment has the potential to introduce much-needed capital and expertise in emerging and developing economies. To attract foreign direct investment, many countries have eased restrictions on foreign ownership in various sectors, reformed their institutions, and set up investment promotion agencies. Until the mid-2010s, Ethiopia remained one of the few countries that resisted this trend, with several stringent restrictions in place on foreign direct investment entry and operations in the country. This study employs a synthetic control method to examine patterns in foreign capital inflows following a series of investment policy reforms that were substantively introduced in th..

his paper studies how the unemployment insurance system should be designed when considering costly self-control. The standard optimal unemployment insurance with dynamic moral hazard features declining benefits over the unemployment spell, without a lower bound on consumption (“immiseration”). As documented in the empirical literature, unemployed workers may be tempted to undervalue the future benefits of job search. The paper models this behavioral bias using costly self-control—a utility cost incurred when a worker’s job search choice deviates from the choice that maximizes current period utility and disregards future utility. Compared with the standard setup with moral hazard alon..

This report summarises the EU Labour Force Survey methodology for 2021–2022 and is the first to reflect updates under the revised EU regulatory framework in the labour force domain. The main...

This paper examines the causal impact of generative artificial intelligence on U.S. labor demand using online job posting data. Exploiting ChatGPT’s release in November 2022 as an exogenous shock, the paper applies difference-in-differences and event study designs to estimate the job displacement effects of generative artificial intelligence. The identification strategy compares labor demand for occupations with high versus low artificial intelligence substitution vulnerability following ChatGPT’s launch, conditioning on similar generative artificial intelligence exposure levels to isolate substitution effects from complementary uses. The analysis uses 285 million job postings collected ..

The concept of “green jobs” has received widespread attention in academic, policy, and public discourse, reflecting the growing emphasis on sustainability and the transition to a low-carbon economy. However, defining and measuring green jobs remains analytically challenging and highly sensitive to methodological choices. This paper systematically examines how alternative classification criteria and data aggregation methods produce markedly divergent estimates of green jobs. It shows that the share of occupations identified as green ranges from 0 to 74 percent depending on the methodology, raising concerns about the comparability and usefulness of green job estimates in practice. Moving b..

In many countries around the world, water scarcity could become a macroeconomically relevant concern. As a key input into production processes (agriculture, power generation, and industrial use) and a common good, water resources risk being overexploited. Regressions with panel data for 169 countries between 1990 and 2020 show that, while water use is positively correlated with output, higher water scarcity is associated with lower gross domestic product growth and investment, and higher inflation. In contrast, water use efficiency is associated with higher gross domestic product growth and lower inflation. Climate scenarios show risks of much more severe water shortages in the future, threa..

This paper analyzes gender disparities in poverty across the life cycle in Latin America and the Caribbean using harmonized household survey data. Although gender gaps in labor market outcomes are well-documented, gendered poverty disparities have remained understudied. The results reveal a gendered poverty penalty that emerges as women enter their prime productive and reproductive years—a penalty that has increased over the past 15 years. The presence of young children significantly increases the likelihood of poverty in a household. Single-mother households and those with sole or no earners face particularly high vulnerability. To explore the determinants of the gendered poverty penalty,..

This paper examines the macroeconomic consequences of climate shocks in Paraguay, a small and open agricultural exporter that is highly exposed to droughts and floods. Utilizing a modified version of the World Bank’s Macro-Fiscal Model, the analysis integrates stochastic climate shocks drawn from external biophysical models to assess the impacts of extreme weather events such as droughts, heatwaves and floods on agriculture and livestock production and labor productivity in Paraguay. The findings reveal significant vulnerabilities in agricultural outputs and exports across a range of climate scenarios. The paper presents a comprehensive analysis across different climate scenarios ranging f..

MANAGE-WB is a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model developed by a network of CGE modelers to support World Bank teams and clients in conducting macroeconomic analyses across a broad range of topics. It is a single-country, open-economy CGE model featuring multiple sectors, institutions, and factors of production. This paper presents the model’s structure and implementation, including its graphical user interface, methods for estimating and updating Social Accounting Matrices (SAMs), as well as tools for conducting sensitivity analyses and stochastic simulations.

This document presents Eurostat’s assessment of the quality of the national and regional accounts data submitted by Member States, Iceland, Norway and Switzerland in 2024, according to the ESS...

This paper uses cross-sectional surveys of households over 2007–21 from Thailand’s Socio-Economic Expenditure Survey to conduct one of the first investigations of the impacts of climatic variability on two key statistics characterizing the distribution of welfare in Thailand: the mean and the variance (or inequality). It shows that historically higher rainfall is positively associated with the mean level of welfare, as measured by household consumption expenditures per capita, and negatively associated with poverty and a variety of measures of inequality in the country. These results validate concerns about the impacts of increased climatic variability and more frequent and intense weath..

This study investigates the factors responsible for the poor performance of 67 electric utilities in 47 countries, using descriptive data from the World Bank, the International Energy Agency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and national sources. The findings show that both cost-side and revenue-side factors are responsible for the poor financial performance of electric utilities. More than two-thirds of vertically integrated utilities and electricity distribution utilities are unable to cover their operational and debt service costs by their revenues. The main causes of the poor financial performance are high fuel costs (particularly oil), low capacity factors, low capital and la..