Statistics

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..

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..

This paper examines whether the African Growth and Opportunity Act—the United States’ unilateral trade preference program for Sub‑Saharan Africa—has served as an effective instrument for development and what its modernization should entail. The study synthesizes 25 years of the African Growth and Opportunity Act experience using U.S. International Trade Commission and related trade statistics, complemented by sectoral and country case studies. The findings indicate that while overall U.S.–Africa two‑way trade remains modest ($48.7 billion in 2024, below its 2008 peak), the African Growth and Opportunity Act’s impacts have been more substantial in non‑oil sectors where tariff ..

Although many studies have examined the factors affecting structural transformation, the role of relative factor endowments has not been extensively explored. This paper examines the effects of the introduction of Bt cotton in India and finds substantial increases in cotton output and the land allocated to growing it. The effects diminish as the ratio of labor-to-land increases. This suggests that when inputs are complementary and technological change is labor augmenting, the relative scarcity of other inputs can limit productivity gains, shaping patterns of structural transformation. Despite increases in cotton land and output, the share of workers in agriculture remained unchanged.

This paper presents the Long-Term Growth Model–Human Capital Extension (LTGM-HC), a spreadsheet-based toolkit that projects the human capital of the workforce from 2025 to 2100 for 153 countries. The LTGM-HC simulates pre-tertiary years of schooling, education quality, and health across age cohorts and how they affect current and future workforce productivity. The paper also produces three sets of general results. First, it provides new estimates of the current rate of human capital growth, which differ substantially from those in the Penn World Tables. Global average human capital growth is almost 1 percent and is surprisingly similar across income groups, as greater historical gains in y..

The FIGARO tables, i.e. the EU inter-country supply, use, and input-output tables, are a widely recognised analytical tool for examining the socio-economic and environmental impacts of...

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 ..