This paper presents a macroeconomic approach to monitoring progress toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in Sub-Saharan Africa. At the heart of our framework is a macro model which captures key linkages between foreign aid, public investment (disaggregated into education,...

Banking sector openness may directly increase growth by improving the quality of financial services and increasing funds available, or indirectly by improving the efficiency of financial intermediaries, both of which may reduce the cost of financing, in turn, increase capital accumulation and...

In Africa, evidence on the interactions among poverty, growth, and income distribution presents a puzzle: While growth has been robust in recent decades, the growth elasticity of poverty has remained low. This suggests that inequality has dampened the pro-poor effects of growth. However, when...

This paper reports on gender differences in responses to a randomized controlled trial that provided encouragement and information nudges to take subsequent economics courses and major in the subject for students enrolled in large introductory economics classes at a large elite public...

Sustainability-Linked Bonds (SLBs) – an innovative debt product that incorporates incentivized sustainability targets – are becoming increasingly popular to encourage issuers to improve their sustainability performance. However, existing SLB structures allow issuers to weaken the link...

This paper uses a newly assembled data set on various types of social protection spending in 154 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 to analyze the effect of the electoral cycle on the size and composition of the social protection stimulus budget. The analysis shows that the...

Over the past two decades developing countries have seen a rapid increase in the number of women taking an active role in the labor market. While acknowledging that this is an important development outcome, this paper cautions against the possible undesired distributional effects that it can...

How can the world reach herd immunity against COVID-19 before the second anniversary of the pandemic, or March 2022? A study of vaccine demand and supply answers this question. A target of vaccinating 60 percent of the population in each country by March 2022 is likely sufficient to achieve...

The main purpose of this paper is to provide a critical overview of the recent empirical contributions that use cross country data to study the effect of product market regulation and reform on a country's macroeconomic performance. After a brief review of the theoretical literature and of...

In 1995 the seven South Asian countries - Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka - initiated a multilateral framework for regionwide integration under the South Asian Preferential Trade Agreement (SAPTA). In a recent initiative, members agreed that SAPTA would...