The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic placed health-care systems around the world under great stress. The sharp increase in demand for health care highlighted the importance of efficient health spending. The negative impact of the pandemic on global economic growth further strengthened the...

This paper examines whether prudential policies help to reduce sovereign bond vulnerability to global spillover risk in ASEAN-4 countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand). We measure sovereign vulnerability within a risk connectedness network among sovereign bonds. The direct...

In Asia, aging countries with slow population growth worry about a lack of workers in the future and see older people's labor as a potential solution. However, this leaves out the work that many older people already do-unpaid care work. Drawing on data from Bangladesh, India, Mongolia, and...

This paper uses a global integrated assessment model to assess how developing Asia, the world's fastest-growing source of carbon emissions, could transition to low-carbon growth. It finds that national net-zero pledges do not have a high chance of keeping peak warming below 2êC. Under an...

We investigate the impact of electrification on the economic, educational, and environmental outcomes of the Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR). We use household-level data and a novel identification scheme, whereby we instrument the electrification status with the proportion of...

Solar adoption exploded until 2015 in Bangladesh, setting a precedent for electrifying previously unconnected areas worldwide. This study tries to measure the welfare effects of solar adoption using the three rounds of the Bangladesh Integrated Household Surveys. We applied both ordinary least...

Increasing oil and food prices and persistent supply chain disruptions in 2022 contributed to inflation in advanced economies that had not been seen in decades. This pushed up interest rates, which in turn led to higher yields in global bond markets. This study examines two distinct channels...

Three major global crises since 2008 have pushed up public and external debt ratios and associated risks across much of Asia and the Pacific. This is confirmed by debt ratio projections and evidence of widening pockets of vulnerability picked up by regional heat maps in this paper. By and large,...

The rural elderly in the People's Republic of China spend less on medical expenditures as they age despite declining health, which raises welfare concerns. This paper investigates the role of intra-household bargaining power on health expenditures of the elderly by evaluating the impact of cash...

We arranged for trained undercover men and women to pose as potential clients and visit all 65 local financial advisory firms in Hong Kong, China. At financial planning firms, but not at securities firms, women were more likely than men to receive advice to buy only individual or only local...