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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The productivity of the world's natural resources is critically dependent on a variety of highly uncertain factors, which obscure individual investors and governments that seek to make long-term, sometimes irreversible investments in their exploration and utilization. These dynamic...

Increased international production fragmentation implies that firms at home rely on imported intermediates for production. In this context, tariff policy design needs to consider the impact downstream of changes in tariffs upstream. Policy makers embarking on tariff reforms need to answer...

This paper studies employment patterns and trends in South Asia to shed light on determinants of extremely low female employment rates in the region. After a comprehensive literature review, the authors use employment data from about one hundred censuses and surveys from Afghanistan, Bangladesh,...

Several new statistical tools and analytical frameworks have been developed recently to measure countries' and sectors' involvement in global value chains. Such wealth of methodologies reflects that different empirical questions call for distinct accounting methods, along with different levels...