Statistics

Thu Duc, a rapidly urbanizing area of Ho Chi Minh City, is well located and heavily invested in policy ambition, yet its output and density remain far below what its position in the metropolitan economy would support. Much of it is also flood exposed. This paper asks how much of that shortfall flood risk explains, and what coordinated investment could recover. A Spatial Computable General Equilibrium model of the Greater Ho Chi Minh City Metropolitan Area, covering 116 cells across Ho Chi Minh City and neighboring provinces, evaluates interventions to 2040. The model endogenizes firm location, household residence and commuting, land use intensity, and agglomeration externalities, recovering ..

Educational attainment among adolescent girls in Nigeria remains low, particularly in the northern states where early marriage and limited schooling constrain women's economic opportunities. This study evaluates whether school-based life skills training delivered in safe spaces within senior secondary schools, alone or combined with digital literacy training, can improve educational, health, and economic outcomes for adolescent girls in northern Nigeria. Twelve months post-intervention, girls in treated schools show modest improvements in curriculum-related knowledge, with no effects on school retention or socio-emotional skills. Adding digital literacy training improved digital skills in th..

Childcare burdens limit productivity among women in the informal sector, but little is known about the optimal design of childcare support. The study randomizes 883 women market vendors in Kampala, Uganda to receive free workplace- or community-based childcare. Free childcare redistributes caregiving away from household members, raises women’s hourly earnings, and improves child development and women’s well-being. Community centers achieve higher utilization and larger gains in development and well-being, while workplace centers generate larger economic impacts. Both models have a high marginal value of public funds. Community centers currently dominate, but workplace-based centers could..

While the literature on the minimum wage is largely retrospective, analyzing impacts of past policy changes, this paper is uniquely forward-looking, forecasting how a proposed reform in Ukraine would affect future employment, earnings, and social contributions. The analysis simulates these effects by mimicking a proposal that would set a minimum wage floor equal to 40 percent of the previous year’s average wage once martial law is over and increasing the minimum wage by two percentage points annually until reaching 50 percent of the previous year’s average wage. The analysis draws on a 10 percent random sample of 2023 worker-level data from the Pension Fund of Ukraine, covering all jobs ..

This paper develops an empirical model to predict episodes of debt servicing difficulties (“debt distress”) in low-income countries, with three main contributions to the existing literature. First, it develops more refined measures of external debt distress episodes that allow timing the onset of distress episodes with increased precision. Second, it develops a systematic algorithm to comprehensively assess the out-of-sample predictive performance of more than 550,000 candidate binary prediction models using J-K-fold cross-validation. Third, it tests whether more sophisticated machine learning algorithms can outperform simple probit models. The paper finds that simple single-equation pro..

How can middle-income economies convert trade openness and productivity-enhancing reforms into higher real income and welfare? This paper develops a quantitative trade model with input-output linkages and labor market frictions to assess the impact of trade and productivity reforms on real income, wages, trade, and production. Thailand and ASEAN provide a useful case because the region spans economies with very different approaches to growth: some deeply embedded in Asian manufacturing value chains, others focused on commodities, export-led industrializers, and countries pursuing more selective integration. This variation allows assessing when openness yields large welfare gains, when produc..

This paper proposes a replicable regulatory and financial framework to achieve universal electricity access as a core component of a just energy transition in Sub-Saharan Africa. It argues that universal access is feasible under realistic constraints when electrification planning, tariff regulation, and capital mobilization are designed as one coherent system rather than separate workstreams. The analysis rests on a computational, multi-period financial model that integrates individual interacting sub-models for every actor in the distribution segment. Versions of the same overall approach are applied to three countries, spanning different starting points and sector structures. Uganda provid..

Venture capital is widely viewed as financing knowledge-intensive, R&D-driven startups, but owing to data constraints, this view has been based largely on high-income economies. By taking a global perspective, this paper documents that what venture capital finances differs systematically across economies, varying with institutional and business conditions rather than following a single model. Using a new cross-country dataset that harmonizes firm-level venture capital records with equity issuance data for more than 150 economies, the data shows that VC markets differ across countries not only in scale but in kind. Outside high-income countries, rather than being concentrated in knowledge int..

Thailand's transition to high-income status is, at its core, an urban challenge. Bangkok generates nearly half of the national gross domestic product, yet its dominance is increasingly constrained by congestion, environmental stress, and diminishing returns to further concentration. Successive National Spatial Development Strategies have called for a more multi-nodal urban hierarchy, but the analytical basis for evaluating that ambition has remained thin. This paper builds and calibrates a Dynamic Recursive Spatial Quantitative General Equilibrium model for Thailand's urban system from 2025 to 2050, and uses it to evaluate three counterfactual policy portfolios that allocate the same aggrega..

Gender gaps in pay and leadership roles are well documented across labor markets. However, the literature on low- and middle-income countries is limited, and it remains unclear whether these gaps reflect sorting into lucrative, high-skill sectors or differential career progression within those sectors. This paper examines gender differences in compensation, advancement, and career-relevant mechanisms within such a high-skill sector, focusing on finance in Ethiopia and using evidence from the country’s largest commercial bank, the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, which is estimated to account for roughly one-quarter of employment in the country’s finance sector. Using six years of administrat..

This report presents the assessment of the pilot project on European Occupational Diseases Statistics, conducted across 24 EU Member States and Switzerland. It highlights methodological approaches,...

Phone surveys emerged as a critical data collection tool in low- and middle-income countries during the COVID-19 pandemic and have since become a permanent feature of the data landscape in many settings. This paper draws on the experience of the Living Standards Measurement Study High-Frequency Phone Surveys — one of the longest-running and largest longitudinal phone survey initiatives in low- and middle-income countries. The paper examines three methodological challenges central to the sustainable implementation of the surveys: individual-level data collection and respondent selection, attrition, and integration of phone and in-person surveys in mixed-mode data systems. The Living Standar..