Worldwide, account ownership increased by 50 percent in the 10 years spanning 2011 to 2021, to reach 76 percent of the global adult population. The goal of financial inclusion is not just for more adults to have accounts but for account owners to benefit from using them, such as for digital...

Mobile banking services offer great potential to expand financial services, particularly payment services, to the poor. They also provide a convenient and cost effective way to access bank accounts. This paper constitutes a first attempt to explain statistically what factors contribute to mobile...

The role of innovation in improving productivity might vary according to a country's relative position in technology advancement. Frontier countries might benefit more from policies that promote firms' internal innovation (create), while follower countries would gain more from policies favoring...

The authors use household level data for Uganda for 1999-2000 and 2002-03, before and after the abolition of user fees for public health services, to explore the effect of this policy on different groups' ability to access health services and morbidity outcomes. They find that the policy change...

This paper assesses the relation between access to markets and cultivated land in Sub-Saharan Africa. Making use of a geo-referenced panel over three decades (1970-2005) during which the road network was significantly improved, the analysis finds a modest but significant positive association...

This paper studies the effects of differences in local administrative burdens in Italy in the years 2005–2007 preceding a major reform that sped up firm registration procedures. Combining regulatory data from a survey on Italian provinces before the reform (costs and time to start a business)...

Critical appraisals of the current and potential benefits from developing country engagement in the World Trade Organization (WTO) focus mainly on the Doha Round of negotiations. This paper examines developing country participation in the WTO dispute settlement system to enforce foreign market...

Although the concept of randomized assignment to control for extraneous factors reaches back hundreds of years, the first empirical use appears to have been in an 1835 trial of homeopathic medicine. Throughout the 19th century, there was primarily a growing awareness of the need for careful...

This paper proposes a multi-product model of firm dynamics to understand the implications of allocative distortions for the decisions of firms to enter, exit, and supply products to the market. These margins of adjustment have been largely neglected in the literature yet have direct...

This paper examines how the applied multi-sector computable general equilibrium (CGE) literature has moved into quantication of the impacts of greater market access for services. This includes discussion of multi-sector linkages to the service sector, as well both measuring barriers to trade and...