Statistics

Business plan competitions aim to identify and spur high-growth entrepreneurs. Two experiments were embedded into in a Kenyan competition to test how intensity of selection and of capital determine entrepreneurial outcomes. Applicants received a US$9,000 grant after a streamlined process or went through multiple selection stages and were randomly assigned US$9,000 or US$36,000. All grants initially generated jobs, but the impacts only persisted over three years under multi-stage selection. The larger grants did not yield greater long-term impacts than the multi-stage US$9,000 grant, suggesting diminishing returns to capital and limited lumpy investment opportunities. Selection, rather than g..

Public employment guarantee schemes, which channeled graduates into lifetime positions in the civil service and state-owned enterprises, were central to state-led industrialization across the postcolonial world, yet they have remained far less studied than temporary workfare programs. This paper provides the first causal estimates of their labor market effects, exploiting the Arab Republic of Egypt's archetypal public employment guarantee, which from the early 1960s guaranteed public sector jobs to secondary and university graduates without competitive examination. The paper measures district-level exposure by secondary school supply on the eve of the reform (1959/60) and links it to individ..

Protected areas cover 17% of the world’s land surface, yet credible evidence on their long-run economic and ecological impacts remains scarce. This paper estimates the effects of South Africa’s protected areas on household income, bird biodiversity, and tourism consumer surplus. For the income and biodiversity analyses, it develops a machine-learning counterfactual approach that recovers the present-day impacts of protected areas created up to 100 years ago. Short-run impacts of newer protected areas are small and statistically insignificant, while older protected areas generate large gains. Prior research may have severely underestimated the benefits of protected areas by only estimatin..

This paper examines how forced displacement shapes child development beyond socioeconomic disadvantage. The paper uses original data on roughly 1,600 Venezuelan refugees, Colombian internally displaced individuals, and nondisplaced children in Medellín, Colombia. The analysis adapts rank-rank regressions from the intergenerational mobility literature to a forced displacement setting, ranking each child’s developmental outcomes against household wealth. The paper documents substantial gaps that persist after holding wealth and parental background fixed. It also shows that the cause of displacement shapes the nature of the gaps. Venezuelan refugees displaced by acute material deprivation fa..

Can energy-rich developing countries convert cheap electricity into AI compute exports? This paper develops a capacity-constrained trade model of AI compute services with bilateral frictions in delivery, regulation, and trust. Calibrating the model across 85 countries shows that several developing economies can produce compute at low cost, but this advantage rarely becomes export competitiveness. Because hardware dominates unit costs and is globally priced, cross-country production costs differ by only 12–20 percent. Modest regulatory, financing, and trust frictions can therefore erase the gains from cheap power. The binding constraint is institutional credibility rather than electricity p..

This paper estimates the medium-run effects, 4.5 years after launch, of a regularization program that granted temporary legal status, freedom of movement, work authorization, and access to social programs to nearly half a million Venezuelan forced migrants in Colombia with no criminal record. Because the program was announced unexpectedly and applied retroactively to migrants who had registered in a census before a sharp eligibility cutoff, the paper identifies its effects using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design and a unique two-wave panel survey. The largest medium-run gains were in social capital. At the cutoff, eligible migrants scored 0.95 standard deviation higher than ineligible ..

This paper, based on the Stanley Fischer Memorial Lecture that the author delivered at the Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics (ABCDE) 2026, examines two structural impediments to broad-based economic development: dysfunctional central bank currency systems and inadequately resolved sovereign debt burdens. On currency, the paper argues that floating exchange rate regimes and multiple exchange rate systems—as practiced in countries such as Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Egypt—systematically transfer wealth from low-income wage earners to a narrow-privileged class, deepening poverty rather than alleviating it. Using Ethiopia as a central case study, the paper documents how successive d..

The Statistical Annex to the Asylum and Migration Overview (AMO) 2025 was co-produced by Eurostat and the European Migration Network (EMN). The part 1 of the annex presents statistics for the EU...

This publication proposes a method to estimate the structural and cyclical components of unemployment for European countries and the European Union as a whole, using data from the first quarter of...

The present report describes the main characteristics of the Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) in the Member States of the European Union, as well as two EFTA countries and three candidate countries in...

The LUCAS 2022 survey provides harmonised statistics on land cover and land use across the EU-27, based on approximately 400.000 points collected through field observation and photo-interpretation....

Multidimensional poverty metrics offer a more complete picture of poverty than monetary poverty, yet their adoption has been limited by data constraints. Often not all dimensions in a multidimensional measure are observed in the same survey, leading to countries being excluded from global measures. This study introduces a novel data fusion approach to estimate multidimensional poverty metrics by combining summary statistics from multiple data sources. The proposed method is validated by simulating typical missing data scenarios using 571 household surveys from 112 countries (1989–2024) to estimate the World Bank’s Multidimensional Poverty Measure. The fusion method accurately predicts va..

This paper uses artificial intelligence-enhanced agent computing to determine how to allocate budgetary resources within a large set of heterogeneous government programs targeting human capital. The approach considers essential features of the budget allocation process: multidimensionality, interdependencies between policy issues, and the political economy of public officials' collective action. The analysis uses highly disaggregated Mexican data covering the 2016-2022 period across 49 federal government human capital programs. It focuses on how expenditure affects program coverage, defined as the share of the population with a public problem and that has access to various government benefit..

This study makes a significant contribution to the expanding body of literature on the energy-growth nexus, distinguishing itself in two important ways. First, this is the first meta-analysis that systematically compares the economic growth impacts of renewable versus nonrenewable energy sources, instead of relying on aggregate energy indicators. Second, it explicitly explores the heterogeneity of these effects in the context of developing countries. These elasticities exhibit notable nonlinearity, following a U-shaped pattern across stages of development. In low-income countries, the relatively higher elasticity for both energy types likely reflects the critical need to expand access, regar..

This paper studies a randomized controlled trial in which undocumented Venezuelan migrants in Colombia were assigned to receive informational videos via WhatsApp encouraging registration in a regularization program. The intervention backfired. Receiving a video reduced take-up by 8 percentage points, a 15 percent decline relative to the control mean. The negative effect operated through two channels. Among individuals who watched, exposure to procedural content discouraged registration. Among those who did not engage, unsolicited contact itself reduced take-up. Both effects were concentrated among individuals at the margin of the decision to participate. These findings challenge the assumpti..

Recognizing that macroeconomic conditions determine aggregate trade imbalances, can tariffs eliminate bilateral trade deficits? The Balanced Trade Tariff Index (BTTI) is introduced as the uniform tariff that closes bilateral deficits while holding macroeconomic conditions fixed. The BTTI depends on bilateral, product-level import demand elasticities estimated using a translog GDP function applied to data from seven major economies. The novel elasticity estimates vary widely across importers, exporters, products, and trade directions. This heterogeneity lowers average implied tariffs relative to homogeneous-elasticity benchmarks, yet implies substantially higher tariffs are required for expor..

This paper provides the first firm-level assessment of agglomeration economies in Mongolia, focusing on Ulaanbaatar, the country’s dominant urban center. Using data from the 2021 Enterprise Census, the paper estimates total factor productivity for a large sample of enter-prises and examines its relationship with localization, urban diversity, and peer productivity. The results indicate robust positive agglomeration effects, alongside suggestive evidence of diminishing returns to localization consistent with an inverted U-shaped pattern. These non-linearities are most apparent in Ulaanbaatar and in manufacturing, although they prove sensitive to alternative agglomeration and productivity me..

This paper examines the local effects of the 2018–19 U.S.-China trade disruptions on Mexico. Combining detailed municipal-level customs data with U.S. tariff schedules, it estimates that municipalities with greater export concentration in products targeted by U.S. tariffs on China (hereafter, tariff exposure) experienced significantly larger nearshoring dividends. An increase of 1 percent in tariff exposure led to a 4.3 percent increase in municipality-level exports to the United States, with gains concentrated in northern and south-central states. These export gains translated into broad labor market improvements: total labor income rose by 5.6 percent for each 1 percent increase in tarif..

This paper investigates the impact of informal competition—defined as competition faced by formal firms from informal enterprises—on the firm-provided worker training among formal manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises. Using a representative dataset of small and medium-sized manufacturing firms in 23 Sub-Saharan African countries, a sizable negative impact is found. A one-standard-deviation increase in informal competition reduces the probability that a firm offers training to its workers by 8.7 to 12.9 percentage points, relative to the sample mean of firms that offer training of approximately 25 percent. Comparable declines are observed in the share of workers receiving trai..

Insecure land rights and limited access to modern inputs are often seen as key constraints on smallholder investment in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper studies both in a three-year field experiment with women farmers in Mozambique, cross-randomizing a statutory land registration intervention with a subsidized package of agricultural inputs and climate-smart agriculture training, and eliciting willingness to pay for the package at randomized prices. Demand for registration was high, but its effects were limited: it produced only a temporary gain in perceived tenure security and did not raise willingness to pay for inputs or down-stream investment. Despite gender-targeted titling, it also did n..

Markets and public institutions must anticipate evolving care demand driven by East Asia and the Pacific’s exceptionally rapid demographic transition. To this end, this paper develops the Care Simulation Model, a demographic model that estimates gaps in childcare and eldercare needs. By integrating publicly available demographic data, the model captures both care needs and the availability of family caregivers across life cycles and cohorts, allowing the assessment of how demographic shifts may change reliance on family-based care. The paper quantifies unmet family care needs and translates them into estimates of potential market size, defined as the share of households likely to require c..

Most students in developing countries receive grade-level instruction despite lacking prerequisite skills, a mismatch that widens learning gaps as students progress. This paper reports evidence from a randomized controlled trial across 38 classrooms and 1,333 ninth-grade students in the Dominican Republic, in which classrooms were randomly assigned to one of three arms: computer-adaptive learning (CAL) software replacing two of seven weekly mathematics hours, CAL combined with small-group tutoring, or a business-as-usual control. CAL improved test scores by 0.29–0.31 standard deviations over six months, among the larger effects documented for education technology interventions in developin..