This paper defines three new indicators that capture the remoteness of local communities within a country context and the overall scale of population dispersion and settlement sparsity across a country.
... See More + The paper also exploits the World Bank’s subnational geography database to estimate the geographical scale of population dispersion and dispersion-adjusted population sparsity for 100 countries around the world. The new indicators are evaluated and explored for several Pacific Island countries, which are often characterized as being remote (in a global context) and highly dispersed. However, within each Pacific Island country, there is enormous variation in the remoteness of individual communities and the extent to which communities are clustered or dispersed from one another, and these conditions can be related to communities' socioeconomic characteristics. The results reflect this. The paper empirically contextualizes the settlement patterns evident in the Pacific Island countries within a broader global context, highlighting the extreme degree of population sparsity in the Pacific, relative to all the other countries that are assessed.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS9179 MAR 10, 2020
This report is the result of work on an impact evaluation (IE) aimed at studying the effects of lowering transaction costs to participating in public procurement.
... See More + The initial project proposed in March 2016 was focused on procurement reforms introduced by the state of Amazonas and its capital city, Manaus, with the aim to reduce the excess of bureaucracy and foster competition in procurement processes. The IE proposed a randomized rollout of an eDocuments platform at the state level aimed at streamlining firm registration by migrating the process online, as well as a randomized rollout of an electronic auction (eAuction) platform for procurement at the municipal level. Despite close collaboration with these governments, logistical and institutional hurdles made implementation of these reforms unfeasible as initially proposed. Nonetheless, the study generated valuable insights from descriptive analysis of the administrative data provided by the Amazonas government.
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This paper studies how crises prompted firms to switch borrowing across markets, impacting the amount borrowed, maturity, and currency denomination at the firm and aggregate levels.
... See More + Using data on worldwide debt issuance from advanced and emerging economies, the paper shows that firms shifted their issuances between domestic and international syndicated loans and corporate bonds during financial crises. Firms reduced their borrowing in shock-hit markets but increased it in other debt markets. Firms also moved toward longer-term markets, maintaining (or even increasing) their borrowing maturity. As they moved toward domestic markets during international crises, firms reduced the share of foreign currency debt. The opposite occurred during domestic crises. Large firms were the ones that switched between international and domestic markets, affecting aggregate capital raising activity. The analysis of four distinct markets generates patterns consistent with credit supply shocks that are different from those obtained when studying the dynamics of individual markets.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS9142 FEB 06, 2020
This paper estimates private sector credit cycles for most of the oil-importing and oil-exporting countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
... See More + Credit cycles are the medium-term component in spectral analysis of real private sector credit growth. In addition, the paper estimates the credit cycles for several Western countries and Japan. The analysis finds substantial differences and rare similarities between credit cycles in the Middle East and North Africa and developed countries. Over 1964-2017, credit cycles in the Middle East and North Africa do not appear to be associated with real gross domestic product growth. They only explain a fraction of the growth in private sector credit, and they do not seem to be synchronized across oil exporters and oil importers.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS9602 NOV 19, 2019
This paper investigates the sources of capital misallocation across a group of 11 developing and developed countries. The main findings are (i) technological frictions, namely, adjustment costs and uncertainty, account for only a modest share of observed misallocation, leaving ample scope for other factors; (ii) heterogeneity in firm-level technologies potentially explains between one-quarter and one-half; but (iii) dispersion in markups is much smaller; and (iv) after accounting for these factors, on average, at least 50 percent of misallocation within each of these countries remains unexplained, suggesting a large role for additional, potentially distortionary factors.
... See More + These factors are largely attributable to a component that is correlated with firm size/productivity and one that is essentially permanent to the firm. The paper reports a broad set of moments describing firm-level investment dynamics and detailed parameter estimates on a country-by-country basis, with an eye toward future work in this area.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS9031 OCT 01, 2019
This policy memo outlines the main points raised and discussed by the representatives ofthe Yemeni private sector in a meeting that was held in Amman on 27th January, 2019.
... See More + Themeeting was a follow up of previous meetings with several private sector bodies and representatives to discuss the formulation of the representative body of the private sector asa cluster. The main aim of the follow up meeting was to officially launch the private sectorcluster and highlight its roles and governance structure to ensure its participation in decisionmaking summarized in the three broad points: engaging the private sector in economic policy-making; enhancing the role of the private sector in humanitarian and development efforts; and engaging the private sector in recovery and reconstruction programs and efforts.
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The purpose of this background note is to give an overview of the literature on output volatility and economic growth, assess output volatility and its impact in São Tomé and Príncipe (STP).
... See More + This note is organized in four sections, besides this introductory part. The second section reviews the literature on the impact of output volatility on economic growth. The third section discusses different measures of volatility, calculating volatility for STP across different periods, and compares them to peer countries. The last section offers some policy recommendations. Output volatility and its relationship with growth have been a hot topic in economic research literature for a long time. There is significant controversy about how economic volatility1 affects economic growth. Although the link between economic growth and volatility is theoretically ambiguous, a negative impact of economic volatility on output growth dominates the empirical literature. This negative relationship also holds with newer and better datasets, advanced econometrics methodologies, and for specific country groups. There are three mains messages in this note. The first one is that volatility affects growth as supported by the literature review and the econometric estimations carried out in this note. The second one is that STP is a volatile country, although volatility of GDP growth and inflation has declined over time and are in line with peers. On the other hand, STP still faces higher volatility on current account balances and net lending and borrowing than its peers. The third message is that, on average, a fifty percent increase in volatility translates into a 25 percent decrease in GDP per capita growth rates. Finally, policy measures aimed at diversifying exports in terms of goods and markets, reduce the reliance on external finance and fiscal rules can help cushion the volatility and reduce its impact.
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