This paper uses the 2011 Cambodia Socio-Economic Survey to analyze the relationship between participation in the garment industry and household welfare.
... See More + The analysis relies on propensity score matching estimators to investigate whether households that have at least one member employed in the textile and apparel sector are better off than those who do not participate in the garment industry, in terms of several monetary and non-monetary welfare indicators. The findings show that garment households are less likely to experience self-reported food insufficiency, and their children are more likely to be enrolled in school. Yet, the positive effect of the treatment is restricted to the bottom 40 percent of the consumption distribution, possibly due to the nature of garment jobs, and the fact that they represent an attractive alternative for the poorest households but not necessarily for the better-off. Using instrumental-variables, the analysis also shows that remittances originating from the textile and apparel sector relax household budget constraints, increasing expenditures in education, health, and investments in agricultural activities.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8061 MAY 16, 2017
This Investment Policy and Promotion Report has been prepared by the Investment Policy and Promotion team of the World Bank Group’s Trade and Competitiveness Global Practice.
... See More + The report aims to serve as a guide to governments to set priorities and policies leading to concrete and measurable results in FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) attraction, retention and benefits to the local economy. These are key elements in any government’s agenda seeking to leverage FDI for creating jobs, increasing the competitiveness of the economy and contributing to sustainable growth.
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Ratings for the Trade Development Support Program Project for Cambodia were as follows: outcomes were satisfactory, risk to development outcome was moderate, Bank performance was moderately satisfactory, and Grantee performance was moderately satisfactory.
... See More + Some lessons learned included: supporting a sector-wide approach (SWAp) can yield benefits to promote integrated policy-making, notably in trade policy, but the underlying institutional framework needs to be solid. Adopting a programmatic approach should not come at the expense of selectivity and prioritization of activities for support. To improve the trade environment, combining activities that yield short and medium-term results and activities with direct and indirect impacts is a favorable option. Developing institutional capacity takes time and is a challenging task, but is a worthy objective in low-capacity environments, such as Cambodia.
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Implementation Completion and Results Report ICR1262 MAY 03, 2017
Kazakhstan is facing its greatest economic challenge since the global crisis. With oil prices at US$50 per barrel, the country urgently needs to adjust its economic model and find new sources of economic growth.
... See More + Kazakhstan main export has been crude oil, considered a low-complexity mineral products, which has made the country extremely vulnerable to shocks. For Kazakhstan to reach high income status it will need to move up the value chain and find new sources of growth. However, new opportunities are arising. China's new Silk Road initiative, renewed regional integration efforts through the Eurasian Economic Union, CAREC and WTO accession are opening up new prospects for Kazakhstan to integrate more successfully with the region and the world and to position itself as a key trade and transit corridor between Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. While Kazakhstan outperforms its regional peers in terms of overall business environment, it still ranks poorly in trading across borders. Kazakhstan is embarking on an economic transformation at a time where new global trends are reshaping economic fundamentals. As countries in Asia and Europe enhance their living standards, opportunity costs will matter more than direct transport costs, resulting in increasing opportunities to transport goods from East Asia to Europe.
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Kazakhstan is facing its greatest economic challenge since the global crisis. With oil prices at US$50 per barrel, the country urgently needs to adjust its economic model and find new sources of economic growth.
... See More + Kazakhstan main export has been crude oil, considered a low-complexity mineral products, which has made the country extremely vulnerable to shocks. For Kazakhstan to reach high income status it will need to move up the value chain and find new sources of growth. However, new opportunities are arising. China's new Silk Road initiative, renewed regional integration efforts through the Eurasian Economic Union, CAREC and WTO accession are opening up new prospects for Kazakhstan to integrate more successfully with the region and the world and to position itself as a key trade and transit corridor between Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. While Kazakhstan outperforms its regional peers in terms of overall business environment, it still ranks poorly in trading across borders. Kazakhstan is embarking on an economic transformation at a time where new global trends are reshaping economic fundamentals. As countries in Asia and Europe enhance their living standards, opportunity costs will matter more than direct transport costs, resulting in increasing opportunities to transport goods from East Asia to Europe.
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Like many emerging economies, South Africa has identified exports as an engine for more inclusive, job-intensive growth. However, employment growth did not follow the substantial export growth that South Africa experienced in the 2000s.
... See More + This paper uses a newly developed World Bank database -- the Labor Content of Exports -- to show that the composition of South Africa's export growth helps to understand the weak relationship between export and employment growth. Minerals exports, which propelled export as well as wage growth, are not job intensive and as a result supported far less job growth. Minerals have also increasingly become an enclave sector with few backward linkages to the domestic economy. In contrast, manufacturing exports support jobs and wages primarily in input-providing sectors, where indirect manufacturing employment is nearly 4.5 times greater than direct manufacturing employment. The paper also documents a shift in the labor content of global value chain–intensive manufacturing sectors away from direct manufacturing to indirect services. Such a shift has been biased toward skilled labor. As a results of these trends, labor in services sectors has been the main beneficiary of South Africa's export growth, absorbing more than half of the growth in wage income from exports over the 2000s, primarily by supplying inputs to other sectors' exports.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8037 APR 25, 2017
This is a statement by Mr. Roberto Azevedo, Director-General at the ninety-fifth meeting of the Development Committee held on April 22, 2017. He states that the World Trade Organization (WTO) commends the efforts that the World Bank Group has taken in supporting trade related infrastructure through the aid for trade initiative.
... See More + He welcomes the steps that the World Bank governors and senior management have taken to support implementation of the WTO's trade facilitation agreement through the trade facilitation support program. This agreement has the potential to deliver significant development gains and so he hope to continue this close collaboration. The World Bank and the WTO can continue to advance their shared goals of raising living standards and ensuring a brighter future for the world's poor.
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Services play a major role in the Senegalese economy, accounting for 66 percent of economic activity and contributing nearly three-quarters of gross domestic product growth between 2006 and 2013.
... See More + During the period, the private sector contributed 71 percent of services and accounted for 84 percent of its contribution to growth. The dynamism of private services is driven primarily by telecommunications and financial services: while the two sub-sectors made up 21 percent of private services, they accounted for nearly half (48 percent) of the contributions of private services to growth during the period. These trends are projected to improve in the future. Available data on employment and credit confirm the critical importance of services. In 2013, over 50 percent of credit to the economy was devoted to services, and 55 percent of the labor force was employed in the services sector, including 36 percent of the rural workforce and as much as 80 percent of the urban workforce.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8031 APR 18, 2017
The development objective of Trade and Logistic Services Competitiveness Project aims to improve the efficiency of trade logistics services in Togo.
... See More + This project has three components. 1) The first component, Strengthening the Logistics Services and the Road Transport Sector, has the following three subcomponents: (i) Improving the Legal and Regulatory Framework for the Transport and Logistics Services Sector; (ii) Building Capacity of the Trade Logistics Services Sector; and (iii) Improving the Conditions to Modernize Trucks. 2) The second component, Improving Trade Facilitation, will provide support for the implementation of the World Trade Organizations (WTO) Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) for the improvement of the enabling environment to achieve higher-quality trade logistics services, including the necessary support to enhance the efficiency of customs administrations as well as other border and trade management agencies to improve overall trade facilitation. 3) The third component, Project Management, will provide support to the Project Coordination Unit (PCU) for the coordination and implementation of project activities, including procurement, financial management (FM), monitoring and evaluation (M and E), and reporting
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Migration and trade are often linked through ethnic networks boosting bilateral trade. This study uses migration to quantify the importance of Ricardian technology differences for international trade.
... See More + The framework provides the first panel estimates connecting country-industry productivity and exports, and the study exploits heterogeneous technology diffusion from immigrant communities in the United States for identification. The latter instruments are developed by combining panel variation on the development of new technologies across US cities with historical settlement patterns for migrants from countries. The instrumented elasticity of export growth on the intensive margin with respect to the exporter's productivity growth is between 1.6 and 2.4, depending upon weighting. This provides an important contribution to the trade literature of Ricardian advantages, and it establishes a connection of migration to home country exports beyond bilateral networks.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8027 APR 10, 2017
The Development Digest is a half-yearly publication that features key works from teams based at the World Bank Group Global Knowledge and Research Hub in Malaysia.
... See More + This second issue of the Development Digest focuses on matters related to economic growth, to productivity, to increasing productivity, public service delivery, trade in Malaysia, and financing for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Lao PDR. Other articles include two pieces on agriculture, focusing on trade and regulation, respectively; innovative financial inclusion, with a spotlight on FinTech and Islamic Finance; migrant remittances; foreign exchange depreciation; the informal sector; and effective public sector implementation.
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This newsletter includes the following headings: monthly highlights; special focus; key publications of prospects group; recent World Bank working papers; key World Bank reports; table A: major data releases; table B: activity and inflation; table C: trade and finance; table D: financial markets; and table E: commodity prices.
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The emergence of global value chains has opened up new ways to achieve development and industrialization. However, new evidence shows that not all countries have gained from participating in global value chains, and that country-specific characteristics matter for economic upgrading in global value chains.
... See More + This paper uses two panel data sets of developing and industrialized countries at the sectoral level to relate global value chain participation as a buyer and seller to domestic value added. These are combined with a wide range of policy measures at the country level that can play a role in economic upgrading through global value chains, by targeting global value chain integration or the quality and conditions of input and output factors. First, the study finds that global value chain integration increases domestic value added, especially on the selling side, which holds across all income levels. Second, the results highlight the importance of policy for economic upgrading through global value chain integration. Although the study cannot claim causal evidence, all the assessed policy areas are consistently shown to mediate the effects of global value chains and magnify the gains for domestic value added. Third, a detailed analysis shows that several policy areas mediate the gains from global value chains more through integration as a seller. Finally, the study observes that many of the results are driven by high- and upper-middle-income countries.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8007 MAR 16, 2017
This paper compares redistribution through trade restrictions versus domestic lump-sum transfers. When preferences are non-homothetic, even domestic lump-sum transfers affect relative prices.
... See More + Thus, contrary to the conventional wisdom, domestic lump-sum transfers are not necessarily superior to distortionary trade policy. The paper develops this argument in the context of the food export bans imposed by many developing countries in the late 2000s.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8005 MAR 14, 2017
Size matters for development. Small economies face unique challenges to economic growth, due to their small land mass and lack of resources to develop human capital.
... See More + They have adapted by being more open to trade-and consequently vulnerable to external sources of volatility, including changes in the global economic environment. Small economies exhibit high levels of specialization in terms of both export destination markets and products, reflecting their need to compete effectively in international markets. Small size also amplifies the impact of another important source of external volatility, natural disasters, by increasing the percentage of a country's land and people exposed to such events when they occur. Aside from external sources of growth volatility, small economies face significant internal challenges to fiscal stability and long – run growth. Small size implies diseconomies of scale in the provision of public goods and therefore these economies face higher costs in providing many government services on a per capita basis. Small economies in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region exhibit low government revenue generation, in line with trends in LAC as whole. Thus, small economies generally-and in LAC in particular- struggle with high public debt burdens.
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Big data solutions have the potential to accelerate the work of our teams by deriving timely, accurate, and actionable insights from alternative data sources in order to close data gaps and inform policymaking.
... See More + For example, pilot projects underway in the Trade and Competitiveness practice are exploring the use of data science techniques to harness publicly available government and commercial data to aid competition authorities in detecting cartels and other anti-competitive practices. We are also mining Internet data to measure innovative economic activity in cities, so agencies can make better informed policy decisions and, we are collecting regulatory data to classify and assess the impacts of non-tariff measures on economies and their competitiveness. This paper, prepared in collaboration with Deloitte and with other global practices within the Bank Group, highlights data-driven pilot projects underway in the Trade & Competitiveness Global Practice and shares compelling cases of how big data is changing the way we look at the challenges countries are facing and how we can best support them.
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This newsletter includes the following headings: monthly highlights; special focus; key publications of prospects group; recent World Bank working papers; key World Bank reports; table A: major data releases; table B: activity and inflation; table C: trade and finance; table D: financial markets; and table E: commodity prices.
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