In 2010 the World Bank approved a US$220 million loan for a Local Government and Decentralization project in Indonesia. The project aims to improve the accountability and reporting of the central government's Specific Purpose Grants (DAK). Piloted in four infrastructure sub-sectors-irrigation,...

Over the past decade, nighttime lights have become a widely used proxy for measuring economic activity. This paper examines the potential for high frequency nighttime lights data to provide “near real-time” tracking of the economic impacts of the COVID-19 crisis in Morocco. At the national...

Amid continuing urban growth and the accelerating effects of climate change, East Asian cities suffer from more extreme temperatures than surrounding rural areas - being up to 2 degrees Celsius hotter on average. This urban heat island (UHI) effect is caused by cities' relative lack of...

With more than 70 percent of its population living in cities, Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is among the most urbanized regions in the world. Yet, although its cities are, on average, more productive than those elsewhere in the world, their productivity lags that of North American and...

The ongoing crisis should spur deeper European integration, rather than a return to the nationalism of the past. The World Development Report 2009, reshaping economic geography, spotlights several issues for new European Union (EU) member states. From 1950 to 1990, Eastern Europe was impermeable...

This map summarizes information on the connectivity of 67 important South Asian cities concerning infrastructure networks. The map combines four information layers to reveal a city's overall stature in the region's infrastructure networks, i.e. rail, road, air, and information technology...

Over the past two decades, China has embarked on an ambitious program of expressway network expansion. By facilitating market integration, this program aims both to promote efficiency at the national level and to contribute to the catch-up of lagging inland regions with prosperous Eastern ones....

There is significant academic evidence that growth in one country tends to have a positive impact on growth in neighboring countries. This paper contributes to this literature by assessing whether growth spillovers tend to vary significantly across world regions and by investigating the...

In the past dozen years, a literature has developed arguing that urbanization has unfolded differently in post-independence Sub-Saharan Africa than in the rest of the developing world, with implications for African economic growth overall. While African countries are more urbanized than other...

A large literature documents the positive influence of a city's skill structure on its rate of economic growth. By contrast, the effect of a city's age structure on its economic growth has been a hitherto largely neglected area of research. This paper hypothesizes that cities with more...