Irregular migration from West Africa to Europe across the Sahara and Mediterranean is extremely risky for migrants and a key policy concern. A cluster-randomized experiment with 3,641 young men from 391 settlements in The Gambia is used to test three approaches to reducing risky migration:...

Recent debates surrounding the lagging COVID-19 vaccination campaigns in low-income countries center around vaccine supply and financing. Yet, relatively little is known about attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccines in these countries and in Africa in particular. This paper provides cross-country...

Remote schools in developing countries are costly to supervise, resulting in low teacher accountability and poor education outcomes. This paper reports the results of a randomized evaluation of three treatments that introduced teacher incentives based on community monitoring of teacher effort...

This paper provides one of the first comprehensive and most updated studies on the effects of firms’ organizational resources, country institutions, and national culture on the survival and growth of private firms around the world during the COVID-19 pandemic. Analyzing World Bank Enterprise...

The paper uses a new country-level, panel data set to study the effect of public sector wages on corruption. The results show that wage inequality in the public sector is an important determinant of the effectiveness of anti-corruption policies. Increasing the wages of public officials could...

Drawing on various macro- and micro-data sources, the authors present robust evidence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between female labor force participation and inequality. Overall, female labor force participation is found to have a strong and significant dis-equalizing impact in at...

Regional trade agreements increasingly include provisions that regulate state-owned enterprises. This paper combines new information on the content of “deep” regional trade agreements and data on Chinese firm-level exports during 2000-11 to analyze the spillover effect of rules on...

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...

This paper provides the first systematic analysis of migration to, within, and from Libya. The data used in the analysis are from the Displacement Tracking Matrix data set of the International Organization for Migration. The analysis uses this unique source of data, combining several techniques...

Community-driven development programs are a popular model for service delivery and socioeconomic development, especially in countries reeling from civil strife. Despite their popularity, the evidence on their impact is mixed at best. Most studies thus far are based on data collected during, or...