Statistics

This paper examines the rise of fintech lending in Indonesia, using a dataset of more than 139,000 individual credit records representative of the full spectrum of consumer loans in the country. The analysis reveals that fintech lending has become deeply embedded in Indonesia’s financial landscape, with more than 40 percent of borrowers holding at least one fintech loan at the end of the sample period. While digital lenders have expanded financial inclusion by reaching significant numbers of previously unbanked households, they remain limited in their geographical reach, primarily finance consumption, and account for only a small share of total consumer credit. Over time, a substantial sha..

Investments in public sector workers’ human capital can generate social returns by improving service delivery and state effectiveness. Yet it is unclear whether public workers internalise these broader benefits when making investment decisions. This study elicited willingness-to-pay (WTP) for professional development from Ethiopian public servants and embedded randomised interventions targeting anticipated benefits. Baseline WTP is positive but below implementation costs. Explicitly emphasising private benefits modestly raises demand compared to highlighting societal returns. Implicitly increasing the salience of a supportive managerial environment substantially increases WTP, underscoring..

This study tests the effects of large language model (LLM) decision support on patient care at two outpatient clinics in Nigeria. Health workers were given the option to make revisions to their initial care plan based on LLM feedback. The unassisted and assisted plans are evaluated using (1) comparisons with independent care plans created by on-site physicians, (2) laboratory tests for malaria, anemia, and urinary tract infections, and (3) a blinded randomized assessment by the on-site physician who saw the same patient. In response to LLM feedback, health workers changed their prescribing for more than half of the patients and reported high satisfaction with the recommendations. In a select..

Using world commodity prices as an instrument, this paper proposes a novel method for decomposing channels of international risk sharing for commodity-exporting countries. The method identifies the commodity “sector”' as the projection of gross national product growth on commodity-price growth, and the non-commodity “sector”' as its orthogonal complement. The findings show that commodity-price-induced risk is shared significantly more than other risks, in particular via pro-cyclical government savings, but also via counter-cyclical net international factor income.

Commodity-exporting countries face important challenges in shielding their economies from commodity price volatility. In an ideal world, a country would buy and sell foreign assets to insure itself against volatility caused by the destabilizing economic impact of gross domestic product fluctuations over time. The literature on the topic, which has mainly focused on risk sharing across advanced economies, has found a puzzlingly low amount of risk sharing. Using a sample of 110 countries between 1995 and 2019, this paper finds that commodity exporters share 46 percent of their risk as a group internationally, significantly more so than non-commodity exporters, which share about 33 percent of t..

This paper, based on the Mattei Lecture that the author delivered at the 2025 Africa Growth and Opportunity–Research in Action Conference, argues that Africa can anchor a new model of growth—and bolster global resilience—by shifting from commodity dependence to value-added production and deeper integration into trade and investment networks. Against a backdrop of strained multilateralism and falling foreign direct investment to developing economies, global trade remains more robust than presumed, with goods, services, and South-South flows expanding. Africa’s goods exports are projected to grow rapidly, and digitally delivered services have surged from a low base, underscoring untapp..

This study explores the gendered impacts of violent crime on economic opportunities in Latin America and the Caribbean. While both men and women experience violent crime, their exposure to violent crime and the consequences they suffer differ. Women are disproportionately affected by intimate partner violence, sexual harassment, and mobility restrictions, all of which limit their labor market participation and economic independence. Through a review of the literature, the study identifies six primary mechanisms through which violent crime affects women’s economic outcomes: sectoral segregation, fear of victimization, mobility constraints, intra-household bargaining power shifts, increased ..

This study investigates the distribution of benefits from public health care spending in Ethiopia by combining individual health care utilization data from the 2018/19 and 2021/22 waves of the Ethiopia Socioeconomic Panel Survey with regional budget information. It analyzes how health care subsidies and out-of-pocket expenditures are distributed across income groups and rural-urban settings. The results show that, although public health care use and subsidies are generally progressive, they tend to favor wealthier individuals. Further disaggregation by facility type and location over time provides deeper insight into these distributions. Hospital care subsidies are largely pro-rich, while be..

This paper proposes a new resilience index, CLARE (Causal machine Learning Approach to Resilience Estimation), which is rooted in an impact evaluation framework and causal machine learning algorithms applied to longitudinal household survey data. The indicator is model-agnostic, data-driven, scalable, and normatively anchored to wellbeing thresholds, and can be either shock-specific or a general-purpose resilience metric. The paper provides an empirical demonstration of constructing the CLARE resilience index, leveraging more than 28,000 household observations from 19 nationally representative, longitudinal, multi-topic surveys that were implemented by the national statistical offices in Mal..

This paper examines Paraguay’s vulnerability to the European Union’s Regulation on Deforestation-Free Products. Drawing on trade data, customs firm-level data, and high-resolution geospatial analysis, it assesses exposure at the country, firm, and geographic levels. The results show that Paraguay’s direct export exposure to the European Union’s Regulation on Deforestation-Free Products is modest, but indirect exposure through Argentina’s soy value chain could affect up to 13 percent of Paraguay’s exports. Firm-level evidence indicates that soy and rubber exports are concentrated among a few large firms, whereas the emerging wood and forestry sector is fragmented across small and ..

Understanding the drivers of credit constraints is essential for fostering private sector development and firm growth. This study examines the channels through which electronic payments influence firm credit constraints across 101 economies. It explores heterogeneity at the firm and aggregate levels to identify key policy and environmental factors that shape this relationship. The findings indicate that payment digitalization plays a critical role in alleviating firm credit constraints, particularly for small firms and in economies with weaker credit infrastructure and lower levels of financial development. These results support the view that electronic payments help reduce information asymm..

Unreliable electricity supply in developing countries is a persistent problem with significant adverse consequences for economic growth. This paper uses a novel database on utilities, which provides systematic data on reliability, and links it to available data on country-level institutions to provide new evidence on variation in reliability across countries. The data reveal that utilities located in countries with weak institutions for controlling corruption perform significantly worse at delivering reliable electricity. The data also show that privately owned utilities perform better than publicly owned ones, consistent with standard reforms of privatization that are pursued to overcome go..

This paper develops a conceptual framework to analyze how gendered social norms mediate the effects of legal frameworks on women’s economic empowerment. Using the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law domains, Safety, Mobility, Work, Pay, Marriage, Parenthood, Childcare, Entrepreneurship, Assets, and Pension, as an organizing structure, the study conducts a targeted, systematic review of 130 studies focused on nearly 30 single-country cases and diverse regional or multi-country contexts. Each study is coded by domain, research method, and type of norm-law interaction, enabling the identification of patterns of evidence and gaps. Only 56 percent of the reviewed studies establish causal..

This paper examines whether project restructuring improves World Bank project performance. Using panel data on Implementation Status and Results ratings, it combines two-way fixed effects with the PanelMatch estimator to address concerns that restructurings are endogenously timed. Restructurings consistently raise Implementation Status and Results ratings, and these gains persist across successive reporting cycles. Timing and scope both matter: early restructurings generate durable improvements, while late interventions yield shorter-lived boosts bounded by project horizons. Level I restructurings produce larger effects than Level II adjustments. These patterns show that adaptation works bes..

How do climate shocks shape resource allocation across firms? Rising temperatures might worsen allocative efficiency if large, productive firms face constraints in adapting. This paper assesses this question in India, an economy characterized by informality, misallocation, and extreme heat. The paper uses census data on 42 million non-farm establishments from 1990 to 2013 linked to granular climate histories to estimate the impact of heat on the firm size distribution. A 1 degree Celsius temperature shock reduces firm size by 11.6 percent, with losses concentrated among large, formal firms. Displaced workers reallocate to smaller, informal firms, generating allocative efficiency losses of up..

Using high-resolution administrative, census, and satellite data, this paper shows that South African cities are characterized by spatial mismatches between where people live and where jobs are located, relative to 20 global peers. Areas within 5 kilometers of commercial centers have 9,300 fewer residents per square kilometer than expected, which is 60 percent below the global median. Poor, dense neighborhoods are most affected. In Johannesburg, a 10-percentile increase in distance from the nearest business hub corresponds to a 3.7-percentile drop in asset wealth (a proxy of household wellbeing) and 4.9-percentile drop in employment. In Cape Town, the declines are 4.0 and 3.7 percentiles, re..

Text and voice messages have emerged as a low-cost and popular tool for nudging recipients to change behavior. This paper presents findings from a randomized controlled trial designed to evaluate the impact of an information campaign using text and voice messages implemented in Punjab, Pakistan during the COVID-19-induced school closures. This campaign sought to increase study time and provide academic support while schools were closed and to encourage reenrollment when they opened, to reduce the number of dropouts. The campaign targeted girls enrolled in grades 5 to 7. Messages were sent out by a government institution, and the campaign lasted from October 2020 until November 2021, when sch..

The business practices of unregistered or informal enterprises can significantly affect their performance and the overall productivity of the sector. However, very little is known about the prevalence of business practices and the sorts of factors that influence their adoption among informal enterprises. This is especially the case in the context of fragile economies. The present paper attempts to fill this gap in the literature by analyzing the adoption of business practices among informal enterprises in the Central African Republic, which serves as a unique context – high informality, low education attainment, and recurrent shocks including conflict and the AIDS epidemic. While several f..

The world faces a pressing challenge to meet key development objectives amid slowing growth and rising macroeconomic and geopolitical risks. With the number of job seekers rising rapidly, infrastructure shortfalls continuing to be large, and climate costs mounting, the case for a significant investment push has never been stronger. Yet the capacity to respond in many emerging markets and developing economies has eroded. Since the global financial crisis, investment growth has slowed to about half its pace in the 2000s, with both public and private investment weakening. Foreign direct investment inflows—a critical source of capital, technology, and managerial know-how—have also fallen sha..

State capacity is an important prerequisite for policy implementation, yet at the country level it is difficult to measure, assess, and reform. This paper proposes a focus on institutional capacity: the ability of public institutions to implement the specific policy mandates for which they are responsible. Based on a review of existing literature, the paper defines the different dimensions that compose institutional capacity and groups them into two cross-cutting categories: organizational dimensions (personnel, financial resources, information systems, and management practices) and governance dimensions (transparency, independence, and accountability). The paper proposes measures for organi..

A randomized experiment tested the effectiveness of individual and small group–based consulting services on firms in the Colombian auto parts industry, finding improvements in management and firm performance over three to four years. This paper uses administrative data to track these firms for up to a decade. Firms in the group consulting intervention are more likely to survive, have higher employment, and have increased sales and profits by approximately 50 percent. This longer-term growth appears to in part come through increased exporting as well as persistent management improvements. The more expensive individual consulting has smaller and not statistically significant long-run impacts..

Despite significant strides toward gender equality, women around the world continue to encounter systemic obstacles that hinder their entrepreneurial success. This paper systematically reviews the literature on the barriers female entrepreneurs face and the solutions proposed to overcome these challenges. It discusses institutional factors, financial factors, human capital factors, and social and cultural factors. The literature overview is complemented by a series of stylized facts that illustrate how overcoming some of these existing barriers is correlated with improved women’s entrepreneurship and female labor force participation, drawing on the World Bank’s Women, Business and the La..

Climate change is widely recognized as a driver of violent conflict, but its broader social effects remain less understood. Ignoring these dimensions risks a vicious cycle where climate policies might undermine socially just adaptation. Evidence is still limited on how climate shocks influence political participation, trust, or migration. This paper helps fill that gap by examining links between climate change, conflict, and social sustainability, with a focus on inclusion, resilience, cohesion, and legitimacy. Using secondary data from 2019–24, the study applies simple correlation-based methods to test three hypotheses on the nature, severity, and composition of these associations. The an..