Private minibuses dominate transport in many developing country cities. They serve 62% of motorized trips in Lagos, the largest city in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper uses original panel data to measure...
The European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) introduces a transformative shift in global trade governance by mandating due diligence for commodities linked to deforestation. While the regulation...
This paper examines the welfare effects of Tanzania’s 2021 levy on mobile money transfers, a policy that sharply increased transaction costs in a country where mobile money is the primary channel for financial...
How important is government business to the private sector in developing economies? This paper uses administrative tax data on firm-to-firm transactions in Kenya to examine the effects of becoming a government...
This paper investigates how firms use green versus conventional debt and the associated firm- and aggregate-level environmental consequences. Employing a dataset of 127,711 global bond and syndicated loan...
This paper provides a sweeping historical overview of how geopolitics has shaped economic development and global institutions, culminating in a forward-looking analysis of challenges facing the world in...
The labor market is undergoing major changes driven by technological, economic, and demographic factors. Climate change and climate action are contributing to these shifts, driving growth in some sectors...
Women are often portrayed in climate discourse as disproportionately vulnerable to environmental change—a reductive framing that, while grounded in evidence, can obscure their agency and leadership in...
Most African coastal nations prohibit industrial vessels from fishing near their shores; these Inshore Exclusion Zones (IEZs) reserve the most productive locations for small-scale, artisanal fishers. However...
The September 2025 update to the poverty and inequality platform (PIP) introduces changes to the data underlying the global poverty estimates. This document details the changes to underlying data and the...
The Country Opinion Survey in China assists the World Bank Group (WBG) in better understanding how stakeholders in China perceive the WBG. It provides the WBG with systematic feedback from national and...
The Country Opinion Survey in China assists the World Bank Group (WBG) in better understanding how stakeholders in China perceive the WBG. It provides the WBG with systematic feedback from national and...
The Country Opinion Survey in China assists the World Bank Group (WBG) in better understanding how stakeholders in China perceive the WBG. It provides the WBG with systematic feedback from national and...
The standard global poverty estimation method - relying on household survey data and consumer price index (CPI) - based inflation - suggests a sharp decline in Madagascar’s international poverty rate (measured...
This paper explores whether satellite imagery can be used to derive a measure to estimate conflict-induced damage to agricultural production and compare the results to those obtained using media-based...
The occurrence of unexpected shocks, such as natural disasters, that destroy physical capital could affect the perception of returns to investment in human capital. This paper tests this hypothesis using...
Violence against women and girls (VAWG) risks in energy operations arise across both the demand and supply sides of the sector. On the demand side, limited access to energy, particularly lighting and clean...
This paper studies the impact of geopolitical risks on international trade, using the Geopolitical Risk (GPR) index of Caldara and Iacoviello (2022) and an empirical gravity model. The impact of spikes...
This paper estimates the gender gap in the performance of firms in Peru using representative data on both formal and informal firms. On average, informal female-led firms have lower sales, labor productivity...
This paper quantifies the short-run economic impact of 21 Atlantic hurricanes on U.S. local business activity from 2017 to 2024 using anonymized Mastercard transaction data aggregated by ZIP code. On average...
