The main goal of this paper is to document and analyze the long-term evolution of inequality of opportunity (IOp) in the four largest European economies (France, Germany, Great Britain and Italy). Relative IOp represents an important portion of total income inequality, with values ranging from...

In developing countries, younger and better-educated cohorts are entering the workforce. This developing world-led education wave is altering the skill composition of the global labor supply, and impacting income distribution, at the national and global levels. This paper analyzes how this...

The halving of oil prices, which happened in a short period between late 2014 and the first months of 2015, has generated major terms of trade losses for oil exporting countries. Even if the oil producing sector normally employs a small group of workers and oil export revenues tend to be...

This paper examines the export behavior of Dominican Republic exporters following the implementation of the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement in 2007. Using a firm-level dataset for 2002-2009, the authors investigate the effects of a tariff reduction on the extensive...

This paper assesses the potential impacts of the removal of agriculture trade distortions using a newly developed dataset and methodological approach for evaluating the global poverty and inequality effects of policy reforms. It finds that liberalization of agriculture and food could increase...

The growing economic fissures in the societies of Europe and Central Asia between generations, between insiders and outsiders in the labor market, between rural and urban communities, and between the super-rich and everyone else, are threatening the sustainability of the social contract. The...

Any time there is an economic crisis; there is the very real potential that its consequences for human welfare will be severe. Thus when the developed world plunged into such a crisis in 2008 and growth rates in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) began to plummet, fears rose that the region...

The World Bank has recently defined two strategic goals: ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity. Shared prosperity is measured as income growth among the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution in the population. The two goals should be achieved in a way that is sustainable...

Aging of populations and convergence between developed and developing countries in per capita incomes are shaping the evolution of saving, investment, capital flows, and, in particular, the cost of capital. When considering these trends, the existing literature argues for either continued, low...