This paper quantifies the impact of market access on local GDP in the West Bank, proxied by nighttime lights, using the deployment of road closure obstacles by the Israeli army between 2005 and 2012 as a quasi-natural experiment generating exogenous temporal and spatial variation in...

Sustainable economic growth and strong institutions are interlinked, and the present report summarizes recent economic and fiscal developments in West Bank and Gaza (WB&G) as well as providing a broad overview of institutional accomplishments to date. The present report begins by discussing the...

Despite sustained output growth since 1997, low-income Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries (CIS-7) have not experienced growth in employment, a phenomenon observed elsewhere in transitional economies and labeled as jobless growth. The author addresses the causes of this phenomenon...

This report stems from the work initiated in the Systematic Country Diagnostic (SCD) forUzbekistan in May 2016, which identified the quality of job creation as a central, cross-cuttingtheme. The SCD emphasized that "over the medium term, creating high-productivity, high-paying jobs for...

Morocco has steered significant resources towards large investments in economic sectors identified as strategic to growth, and for increased productivity and value addition. Despite Morocco's strikingly high investment rate, one of the highest in the world at an average of thirty-four percent of...

Addressing Serbia's labor market problems is critical to enhancing growth and job creation. Low labor force participation, relatively high unemployment, particularly among youth and other disadvantaged groups, and rising skills gaps currently impede efficient use of human capital and the...

Slavonia's economy is now amongst the poorest in the European Union (EU) and has been growing more slowly than comparable regions. Some Polish and Romanian counties were less advanced until 2013 but have now overtaken Slavonia. Achieving a turnaround is difficult: only 9 percent of lagging...

The many and varied crises in the world economy since 2007 seem to have different origins and diverse manifestations. This paper contends that there is however a structural shift beneath the global economy that is now reaching a critical mass, and that accounts for many of these crises, despite...