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WORKING PAPERS
April 04, 2024
Star firms, defined as the top 10 percentile of firms in the world in terms of return on invested capital, are more likely to occur in high-income countries and manufacturing industry, but there is an increasing share of star firms from middle-income countries and the services sector. Star firms hav...
WORKING PAPERS
April 02, 2024
Starting in 2001, duty-free access to U.S. markets under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) led to a brief boom in African manufacturing exports, particularly apparel, which then fizzled in the face of unfettered Chinese competition after 2005. The looming expiration of AGOA—and eroding C...
WORKING PAPERS
February 08, 2024
A fracturing of the institutional infrastructure undergirding globalization would harm efforts to cope with urgent national problems and international crises. The imperative for the leading economic powers is to defuse threats to globalization and to promote resilience of global value chains. The fl...
WORKING PAPERS
February 05, 2024
Textbooks play a critical role in schooling around the world but many books continue to under-represent women and girls, and to portray men and women in stereotypical gendered roles. In this paper, we use quantitative text analysis to assess the degree of gender bias in a newly assembled corpus of 1...
WORKING PAPERS
October 11, 2023
Many countries are facing a much harsher budgetary prospect than a few years ago. For low- and middle-income countries in particular, domestic health expenditure is expected to plateau or contract (in real terms) for many until 2027, development assistance for health has already plateaued, and a deb...
WORKING PAPERS
August 30, 2023
Higher levels of fiscal redistribution, through income taxes and direct transfers, increase the probability of achieving inclusive growth. To spur inclusive growth in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, countries with limited fiscal space will need to focus on improving efficiency and reallocate ex...
WORKING PAPERS
August 29, 2023
The war in Ukraine was associated with large changes in the prices of key food and fuel commodities in 2022 which produced macroeconomic gains for exporters and losses as import costs increased. Across 49 countries benefitting, these gains averaged about 8 percent of GDP and reach up to 36 percent o...
WORKING PAPERS
April 28, 2023
Approximately 770 million adults worldwide are classified as illiterate. Despite the potential for adult education programs to bridge this gap, such programs are often plagued by low enrollment, high dropout, and limited skills acquisition. Recent research in educational neuroscience and economics o...
WORKING PAPERS
October 31, 2022
We construct a novel database covering more than 450 fiscal consolidation episodes in 185 countries during the period 1979-2019. Using discrete choice models, we then examine the (broader macroeconomic and political) factors motivating these fiscal consolidation episodes.