The recent political upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa region have exposed growing concerns about conflict risk, political stability, and reform prospects across its societies. Given the prevalence of oil and gas resource endowments in the region, which a voluminous literature...

Not only do Africa's fragile states grow more slowly than non-fragile states, but they seem to be caught in a "fragility trap" . For instance, the probability that a fragile state in 2001 was still fragile in 2009 was 0.95. This paper presents an economic model where three features -- political...

How can foreign aid to agriculture support economic growth in Africa? This paper constructs a geographically-indexed applied general equilibrium model that considers pathways through which aid might affect growth and structural transformation of labor markets in the context of soil nutrient...

In this paper, Arbache, Go, and Page examine the recent acceleration of growth in Africa. Unlike the past, the performance is now registered broadly across several types of countries-particularly the oil-exporting and resource-intensive countries and, in more recent years, the large- and...

This paper revisits and expands the evidence on the impact of trade shocks on intra-state conflict with a large sample of developing countries in the 1960-2010 period. The results suggest that increases in the prices of a country's exported commodities raise the country's risk of civil conflict...

This paper argues that state weakness is broader than implied previously in the civil war literature, and that particular types of weakness in interaction with natural resources have aggravating or mitigating consequences for the risk of civil war. While in anocracies or unstable regimes natural...

This paper discusses the analytical foundations of international comparisons for assessing a country's potential for improvement along various dimensions of social and economic development. The paper presents the Stochastic Frontier approach and applies it to estimate feasible frontiers or...

In Latin America, labor markets have been the main channel through which growth has reduced poverty, with higher labor income accounting for 49 percent of the reduction in poverty in 2008?13. Understanding labor markets is critical to designing policies and programs aimed at reducing poverty....

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the operations that the World Bank has supported to create jobs and promote employment in fragile and conflict-affected situations. A novel approach to identifying projects is presented that enables searching for projects based on stated development...

Firms in many developing countries cite macroeconomic instability and political uncertainty as major constraints to their growth. Economic theory suggests uncertainty can cause firms to delay investments until uncertainty is resolved. A randomized experiment was conducted in post-revolution...