Economies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) remain in crisis. The World Bank estimates the regional output to have contracted 3.8 percent in 2020 and expects it to rebound by only 2.2 percent...
This paper examines within-sector resource misallocation in three Southeast Asian countries -- Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam. The methodology accounts for measurement error in revenues and costs. The...
The quest for status is a powerful motivator, but does it affect inequality? This paper presents a novel lab experiment that was designed and conducted to identify the relationship between inequality...
This paper explores the spillover of protests across countries using data on nonviolent and spontaneous demonstrations for 200 countries from 2000 to 2020. Using an autoregressive spatial model, the analysis...
This paper explores the dynamics of media chatter about economic reforms using text analysis from about a billion newspaper articles in 28 languages. The paper shows that the intensity of reform chatter...
Using a new dataset of 207 national elections across 50 democracies, this paper is the first to systematically examine the effects of oil price shocks on incumbents’ political fortunes in developed oil-importing...
Due to the dual shocks of the spread of the virus and lower oil prices, World Bank economists expect output of MENA to decline in 2020. This is in sharp contrast to the growth forecast of 2.6 percent published...
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Due to the dual shocks of the spread of the virus and lower oil prices, World Bank economists expect output of MENA to decline in 2020. This is in sharp contrast to the growth forecast of 2.6 percent published...
This paper examines the impacts of U.S.-China trade tensions via the lens of East Asian stock markets. Studying 10 indices of the main East Asian stock markets, it finds that announcements of "trade war"...
This paper documents the existence of a "middle-income trap" for the Middle East and North Africa region and contrasts the evidence with that of the East Asia and Pacific region. The results are two-folds...
This paper examines the labor market impacts of a large-scale marine environmental crisis caused by toxic chemical contamination in Vietnam's central coast in 2016. Combining labor force surveys with satellite...
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World Bank economists expect economic growth in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) to continue at a modest pace of about 1.5 to 3.5 percent during 2019-2021, with some laggards and a few emerging...
World Bank economists expect economic growth in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) to continue at a modest pace of about 1.5 to 3.5 percent during 2019-2021, with some laggards and a few emerging...
Over the past decades, East Asia and Pacific's productivity has been gradually catching up with the frontier (the United States), with China leading the pack. Productivity growth has been driven by sustained...
This paper studies the effects of a reform in Serbia that transferred business registration from regional courts to a centralized agency. Using administrative data, the analysis employs a difference-in-difference...
Economic growth in the MENA region is forecast to improve modestly, reaching an average of 2.6 percent in 2019-2020. Oil exporters will significantly benefit from higher oil prices and external oil demand...
Economic growth in the MENA region is forecast to improve modestly, reaching an average of 2.6 percent in 2019-2020. Oil exporters will significantly benefit from higher oil prices and external oil demand...
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