Statistics

In the presence of gender-specific barriers, certain workplace environments and amenities may be particularly important for women, yet difficult to observe during job search due to information frictions. A large-scale field experiment on Pakistan's online job board publicized these job characteristics—namely, supervisor gender, coworker gender composition, work flexibility, commuting support, and overnight travel requirements. Information on these characteristics was randomly disclosed in job advertisements and email alerts. Analysis at the job-alert level shows that female jobseekers respond to supervisor gender, remote work, and commuting support. At the job level, when these characteris..

Does extending full health coverage to an excluded group induce health externalities for the population already insured? In 2022 Colombia expanded health services from emergency only to full access to approximately two million Venezuelan migrants. Comparing municipalities more and less exposed to program take-up before and after its onset, this paper finds that the program reduced mortality rates for Colombians, saving one Colombian life for each 300 migrants covered. The effects are explained by a more efficient use of the health services by beneficiaries and regular and timely payments for the newly insured patients. The Colombian deaths saved are those that timely health treatment prevent..

Uzbekistan is advancing a comprehensive package of market-oriented reforms as part of its World Trade Organization accession strategy, including the abolition of monopolies, trade liberalization (removal of a range of export-related subsidies and tax incentives), the elimination of domestic producer preferences in public procurement, and an anticipated rise in foreign direct investment. This paper evaluates the macroeconomic and distributional impacts of reforms using an integrated computable general equilibrium–microsimulation framework that combines the World Bank’s MANAGE-WB model with household-level data from the 2024 Uzbekistan Household Budget Survey. The results show that the coo..

Although many studies have analyzed the drivers and impact of foreign direct investment, less is known about its determinants at different stages of the investment planning and implementation cycle. Meanwhile, researchers are increasingly relying on data tracking announcements of FDI projects, rather than traditional balance-of-payments information, which reflects actual investments. What share of announced projects is completed, and what factors can derail an investment’s progress after a decision is announced? This paper examines the implementation outcomes of all large announced greenfield FDI projects in low-income countries between 2011 and 2020 and explores some of the factors associ..

Women-owned-or-led small and medium-sized enterprises (WSMEs) are underrepresented in public and corporate supply chains worldwide. There is growing interest in promoting SMEs’ and WSMEs’ integration into value chains, but limited causal evidence whether interventions to support their participation in procurement are effective. This paper conducts a phased randomized controlled trial to estimate the impacts of corporate procurement training for WSMEs in Colombia. The program increases procurement knowledge and readiness, resulting in a ten percentage point increase in registrations to corporate portals, and an eight percentage point increase in the likelihood of submitting a bid. Impacts..

This paper examines the long-run evolution of de jure legal inclusion for sexual and gender minorities and analyzes its structural and institutional drivers. The study used the Equality of Opportunity for Sexual and Gender Minorities measurement framework to construct a panel data set of 133 legal and policy questions for 64 countries from 1961 to 2024. Feature-based time-series clustering identifies three trajectories: limited progress, reversals, and low inclusion; gradual improvement and moderate inclusion; and accelerated progress and high inclusion. Legal inclusion for sexual and gender minorities has risen faster since the late 1990s, but the gains have been uneven across countries and..

Private debt is an important form of corporate financing in emerging markets, but its investor returns are not well understood. This paper uses loan-level cash flow data from the International Finance Corporation to provide the first systematic evidence on realized returns across 4,109 loans over more than 20 years, totaling about US$115 billion in 127 countries. Post–global financial crisis loans outperform both the JPMorgan Corporate Emerging Market Bond Index and U.S. Treasuries, with public market equivalents of 1.02 and 1.10, respectively, rising to 1.05 and 1.14 over the latest five years. Over 2002–24, the corresponding public market equivalents are 0.98 and 1.07, respectively, wi..

This paper documents how foreign firms, inputs, and subsidies have shaped the development of Viet Nam’s solar panel industry. The analysis uses firmto-firm transaction data from Panjiva as well as firm-level data from the Viet Nam’s Enterprise Survey to trace solar panel value chains. It uncovers three key findings. First, parts and components from subsidizing countries are 30 percent cheaper than alternatives. Those from China, which provides the majority of solar inputs to Vietnamese producers, are cheapest. Foreign green subsidies may thus spill over across countries via value chains. Second, Chinese FDI firms dominate Viet Nam’s solar industry, accounting for 75% of exports and 50 ..

Generative AI is being deployed across the public sectors of developing countries on the premise that it makes workers faster. This paper tests this in a randomized trial with 1,269 sixth-grade teachers across 390 public schools in Lima, Peru. A low-cost program—a one-day training, an AI license, and eight months of light-touch follow-up—raised adoption sharply yet saved teachers no time on any of their core tasks, with precisely estimated nulls throughout. The gains lay elsewhere: treated teachers wrote markedly better prompts, including on a rubric designed independently of the training, and were sharper at catching weak AI outputs. These gains were largest for older teachers, who bega..

Quality education drives economic growth and equality. Saudi Arabia has achieved near-universal enrollment but still trails peers in learning quality, limiting workforce readiness. Using data from 97 countries (2000–19), this paper models how Harmonized Learning Outcomes affect gross domestic product growth, accounting for factors like resource income. A 180-point rise in learning—matching the world’s best—could raise Saudi Arabia’s gross domestic product by 27 percent in 20 years, or $225 billion (in 2021 prices). Simulated scenarios yield gains of $125 billion to $156 billion, or 15 to 19 percent of gross domestic product, with front-loaded improvements offering faster returns. S..

This study investigates the impact of divorce legalization on marriage decisions and intra-household specialization using Chile’s 2004 reform as a case study. Opponents feared that introducing divorce would weaken the commitment value of marriage. Instead, the study documents a reversal of sharply declining trends in marriage rates, marital fertility, and the choice of the community property marriage regime in the 15 years following the law. These effects were most pronounced among highly educated women. The study hypothesizes that the introduction of legal divorce with equal division of marital assets allowed husbands to insure homemakers against the economic risks of informal marital sep..

China’s growing dominance in manufacturing exports is attracting widespread attention. However, existing explanations of China’s export exceptionalism and its consequences for developing countries suffer from three shortcomings. First, attributing China’s large and increasing share in manufacturing exports primarily to its industrial policy obscures more fundamental factors: the scale of its economy, the diversity of its provincial endowments, and the pace of its automation. Second, focusing on the low-skilled export dimension of China’s economic expansion overlooks its positive impact on growth and its heterogeneous effects on structural transformation in developing countries. Final..

Female-targeted cash transfers are widely used as a policy tool to enhance women’s empowerment. However, little is known about what happens when payments stop — whether due to budget cuts, program changes, or recipient graduation. This paper studies how women are affected by unanticipated program exit, and whether they experience backlash when they stop bringing cash home. Using a regression discontinuity-in-differences design around a revised eligibility threshold, the study followed 2,333 women exiting Pakistan’s largest cash transfer program, surveying them before program exit and one year after it. Drawing on comprehensive measures of empowerment, intimate partner violence, and wel..

China’s export performance is characterized by two striking features: a steady rise in export sophistication and the continued prominence of less sophisticated products. In this paper we propose the “Many Chinas” hypothesis, that China’s provinces differ in their comparative advantage, and in how this comparative advantage has evolved over time. Using detailed Chinese customs export data from 1995 to 2023, we investigate the provincial underpinnings of China’s export performance. Three main findings emerge. First, export similarity between Chinese provinces and the advanced economies increased over time, initially more rapidly in the Eastern provinces. Second, despite this increase..

Three key developments, protectionism, aging, and automation, are affecting the global pattern of industrial production and trade. While these trends affect many countries, they are especially consequential for China, which currently dominates global manufacturing. Using a multi-country model fitted with global trade and robotization data, this paper shows that automation can mitigate the adverse effects of protection and aging on competitiveness, particularly in sectors with a high share of automatable tasks. The impact of a 10 percent decline in labor force in China would be offset by doubling of robot productivity in vehicles, but robot productivity would need to more than triple in compu..

This paper analyses how China’s rapid expansion has affected growth in other developing economies through the trade channel. The empirical strategy is a shift-share design that exploits pre-determined variation across countries in the exposure of their exports to China’s import demand and export supply in global markets, well before China became a dominant trader. The paper shows that China’s rising demand for commodities and intermediate goods has had a favorable impact on other developing countries’ growth, while intensified competition from its manufacturing exports has had an adverse effect. The former effect is stronger and therefore the net effect has been positive for most cou..

This paper uses labor force surveys from 160 countries to build a new microdatabase on hours worked covering 97% of the world population in cross section. The database also includes time series spanning over 20 years in 86 countries. Hours worked per adult slightly decline with GDP per capita but are weakly correlated with development overall. Hours worked by the young (aged 15–19) and elderly (aged 60+) fall with development, driven entirely by growing school attendance and public pension coverage. Hours worked among prime-age adults (aged 20–59) are stable with development but undergo a great gender reshuffling: falling male hours per worker have been exactly offset by increases in fem..

This paper analyzes the trade policies, including tariffs and non-tariff measures, of major markets for Ghana’s exports. Based on the latest available data, it shows that high-income countries rely more heavily on non-tariff measures than on tariffs, while developing countries tend to impose more restrictive tariff barriers than high-income countries. In several developed markets, Ghana benefits from low or zero tariffs through preferential access and unilateral preference schemes. However, Ghanaian exports in these markets still face substantial non-tariff measures, particularly in agricultural products such as cocoa beans, cocoa paste and butter, and coconuts and cashews. These non-tarif..

Tunisia is among the Mediterranean’s most climate-exposed countries facing acute water scarcity. Although a growing literature has documented the effects of extreme weather on firms, few studies have used longitudinal administrative data to track how business performance evolves over time. This paper draws on about two decades of firm-level records from Tunisia’s formal business registry (Répertoire National des Entreprises), linking firm locations to satellite-based precipitation measures at the delegation level, which is Tunisia’s second-level administrative unit. Using more than 1 million firm-year observations, the study finds that droughts—defined as negative precipitation shoc..

Artificial intelligence (AI) has great potential to enhance public services. Yet there is little evidence on how governments are adopting AI, especially in non-high-income economies. This paper provides new cross-economy evidence from the AI and Data for Better Governance Survey, covering 60 economies across all income levels and collecting information from central digital agencies, sectoral ministries, and management information system leads. The paper documents three main findings. First, AI adoption in government is broad but shallow and uneven. Most governments report some use of AI, yet adoption is generally ad hoc and rarely institutionalized. Second, constraints vary with income level..

Women’s agency – their ability to define and act on their goals – is often the target of policies and programs, both as a means of reducing other gender inequities and as an end in and of itself. Measuring agency is complex, and variation in how the concept is operationalized contributes to difficulty in synthesizing evidence on the topic. At the same time, standard measures that are used in large-scale survey programs are often treated as universal and compared across widely differing settings. This paper investigates the extent to which a single scale for women’s agency can be used across contexts. The study replicates and builds on a recent study in India that used qualitative dat..

Understanding specific barriers to job search and returns to relaxing these barriers is important for economists and policymakers. An experiment that changed the default process for initiating job applications increased applications by 600 percent on a search platform in Pakistan. Perhaps surprisingly, the marginal treatment-induced applications have approximately constant rather than decreasing returns. These results are consistent with a directed search model in which some jobseekers miss some high-return vacancies due to the psychological costs of initiating applications. These findings show that small reductions in search costs can substantially improve search outcomes in environments wi..

Ambient air pollution is a major health risk, but its implications for human capital formation are not well understood, particularly in low- and middle-income countries where exposure is high. This paper estimates the causal effect of sustained exposure to fine particulate matter on primary-school learning in rural Punjab, Pakistan. The paper combines longitudinal student achievement data from the Learning and Educational Achievements in Punjab Schools project with high-resolution satellite-based fine particulate matter estimates. To address endogeneity of pollution to local economic activity, the analysis exploits plausibly exogenous variation generated by open burning of agricultural resid..

Hidden government debt—liabilities that governments incurred but did not fully disclose—can undermine fiscal sustainability. This paper identifies seven hidden-debt revelations during 2005–25 and measures the response of daily sovereign risk spreads following revelations. It finds that sovereign risk spreads rise gradually but persistently in response to a revelation. The pooled sovereign risk spread for the seven countries rises substantially, by 108 basis points on average during the first 30 days after a revelation (with 66 basis points of that in the first 10 days), and an additional 98 basis points during days 31–60. The baseline results are robust to various alternative specifi..

Expanding market access via digital technologies is seen as a key pathway for growth, yet adoption remains low among small enterprises. This paper investigates barriers to entry through two randomized experiments in the country of Georgia. The findings show that a \