This Selected Issues paper reviews recent developments in growth and employment in Bulgaria and highlights key constraints to growth suggested by cross-country competitiveness studies. Bulgaria’s GDP has grown substantially since economic and financial stabilization in 1997. The global...

Macroeconomic instability has been increasingly considered as a factor lowering average income growth and, in this way, is a factor slowing down poverty reduction. But it can also result in slower poverty reduction for a given average rate of growth, due to poverty traps, often examined at the...

Nigeria has recorded impressive growth in the last decade, yet the impact of this growth on poverty reduction remains unclear. This paper appraises spatial and temporal non-monetary multidimensional poverty in Nigeria using the first-order dominance approach. It examines five welfare indicators:...

We introduce two separate datasets - the Global Consumption Dataset and the Global Income Dataset - containing an unprecedented portrait of consumption and income of persons over time, within and across countries, around the world. The benchmark version of the dataset presents estimates in...

This paper makes new estimates of the cost of ending poverty and the global distribution of both the cost and poverty itself. First, the paper discusses definitions of 'ending' poverty, arguing that there is an overemphasis (e.g. SDG 1) on the extreme poverty line which is insufficient for...

The effects of social transfers on growth are still unclear. The limitations of aggregated data at sub-national levels have confined the analysis to the use of simulation models and household surveys. As an alternative, this paper contributes to the empirical literature by assessing the effects...

Over 1.8 billion people, from Central Europe to East Asia, have been involved in the great systemic transformation to market economy, civic society and democracy. The process has brought mixed fruits. The diversification of the current situation is a result of both the legacy from the past and...

This paper evaluates structural change, inequality dynamics, and industrial policy in South Africa between 1960 and the present day. We find that South Africa experienced growth-enhancing structural transformation until the early 1970s, before entering a period of premature deindustrialization....

This paper investigates the linkage between social protection and economic resilience. Does social protection have an impact on income? What role do social protection policies play in strengthening a society's capacity to overcome economic hardships? The recent crisis has brought these questions...

This Selected Issues paper reviews the extent to which growth in Ethiopia has translated into higher living standards. A key feature of the economic strategy has been an explicit commitment to poverty reduction and structural transformation. This is underpinned by the vision of a...