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THIS ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW. Corruption is widely believed to have an adverse effect on the economic performance of a country. However, many East and Southeast Asian countries either achieved or currently are achieving impressively rapid economic growth despite widespread corruption...
Exchange rate volatility is said to exemplify the economic health of a country. Exchange rate break points (known as structural breaks) have a momentous impact on the macroeconomy of a country. Nonetheless, this country study makes use of both unsupervised and supervised machine learning...
As the world battles with the triple problems of social, economic, and environmental challenges, it has become important to focus both policy and research efforts on these. Therefore, this study examines the effect of wealth inequality on CO2 emissions in five emerging economies: Brazil, Russia,...
The successful use of special economic zones as economic tools for export-led industrial development in East Asia propelled a wave of similar initiatives across Africa. In Southern Africa, Zambia and South Africa instituted special economic zones in their respective legal and institutional...
The most important determinant of households’ livelihoods is how much they earn for their labour. People in informal work are more likely to be low earners, to live in poverty, and to make fewer transitions into the higher-paying work statuses. The paper is divided into three main...
The emergence of a mass market for electric vehicles (EVs) offers considerable development opportunities for resource exporters, given their intensive raw material requirements, including for cobalt, nickel, lithium, copper, aluminium, and manganese. To exploit the benefits of new demand,...
For most of its 75-year existence, the United Nations has struggled to strike a balance between its lofty founding aspirations and realities on the ground. But in today's fast-changing geopolitical environment, the organization may be facing its biggest challenge yet. LONDON – For...
The Indian labour market is characterized by a high level of informality, with large numbers of workers in poorly paid ‘lower-tier’ informal jobs, and somewhat better paid ‘upper-tier’ informal jobs, which do not have the same benefits and security of tenure as formal jobs...
As COVID-19 ravages international trade and production, policy-makers are shifting their sights from global value chains (GVCs) to regional value chains (RVCs) as pathways to industrialization. This blog presents evidence from the textiles and apparel sector in Tanzania, which shows that...
States with fragile state health systems have been commended for effective responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. But if we take into account factors such as favourable climate and the age structure of the population, the COVID-19 impact is, in fact, greater on states with weak institutions, explain...
Globally, around 250 million children under the age of five do not meet key development milestones, which reduces their ability to reach their full potential. This column explores the evidence on what works to promote positive parenting practices, particularly in low-income contexts. The authors...
Small firms are more sensitive to changes in interest rates. Small firms which are financially constrained, and have relatively weaker balance sheets and idiosyncratic risks, also face a higher cost of capital from external sources On average, a one percentage point increase in interest...
Regional integration in Africa has potential for increasing regional trade and contribute towards industrialization and economic development. Agro-processing trade offers numerous opportunities for southern Africa countries and is a potential area of business to reduce poverty in the region....
For a growing number of countries in Africa the discovery of natural resources is a great opportunity, but one accompanied by considerable risks. There is an extensive literature linking natural resource dependence to poor economic performance. One cause is that resource-abundant economies tend...
The world needs a people’s vaccine for COVID-19 — one provided universally, and accessible to the entire world population. A patent-protected vaccine could ultimately exclude many people from being vaccinated and protected. Unfortunately, most projects to develop a COVID-19 vaccine...
We examine the effect of pandemics on selected commodity prices—in particular, those of zinc, copper, lead, and oil. We set up a vector autoregressive model and analyse data since the mid-nineteenth century to determine how prices reacted to pandemics such as the 1918 Spanish Flu, 1957...