Statistics

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..

This study examines how configurations of public financial management performance, sectoral spending, and governance context shape education and health outcomes across developing and middle-income economies. Using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis and Bayesian robustness checks, the analysis identifies multiple sufficient pathways linking budget execution credibility to primary education, secondary education, universal health coverage, and under five mortality outcomes. The findings confirm that public financial management conditions operate through conjunctural combinations rather than linear channels, their explanatory reach is stronger for intermediate than longer term outcomes, ..

Addressing the massive test score gaps between rich and poor countries will require programs that are both high-impact and scalable. This study uses the results of a randomized controlled trial in low-fee private schools in Ghana to study a program that meets both needs. The Tools for Foundational Learning Improvement program increased test scores by 0.5 standard deviation after just nine months of intervention. A machine learning method decomposes the effects by predicted test scores if the students did not receive the treatment, and the findings show that the gains were larger for weaker students. Moreover, the program’s impacts scale roughly linearly with time compared to a shorter-term..

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..