Child labor is pervasive across sub-Saharan Africa. The common assumption is that monetary poverty is its most important cause. This paper investigates this hypothesis with empirical evidence by exploring structural, geographic, monetary, demographic, cultural, seasonal and school-supply factors...

This paper investigates how the permanent departure of the father from a household affects children's school enrollment and work participation in rural Colombia. The results indicate that the permanent departure of the father decreases children's school enrollment by approximately 5 percentage...

Conditional cash transfers boosted a major reduction in poverty and a significant decrease in inequality in developing countries over the past decade. However, their success in promoting economic development is challenged by the claim that they deal with short-term poverty relief without...

Financial globalization, defined as global linkages through cross-border financial flows, has become increasingly relevant for emerging markets as they integrate financially with the rest of the world. This paper argues that, because of the way it is often measured, it has also led to the...

This paper assesses the international comovement of gross capital inflows and outflows using a two-level factor model. Among advanced and emerging countries, capital flows exhibit strong commonality: common (global and country group-specific) factors account, on average, for close to half of...

The past decades witnessed big changes in international trade with the rise of global value chains. Some countries, such as China, Poland, and Vietnam, rode the tide, while other countries, many in the Africa region, faltered. This paper studies the determinants of participation in global value...

The world economy has experienced four global recessions over the past seven decades: in 1975, 1982, 1991, and 2009. During each of these episodes, annual real per capita global gross domestic product contracted, and this contraction was accompanied by weakening of other key indicators of global...

This paper computes a new financial globalization index for a large sample of countries for 1992-2016. Unlike other measures, the financial globalization index corrects for the heteroscedasticity of global volatility. This leads to a downward adjustment of financial globalization trends for...

Inadequate infrastructure impedes the productivity of manufacturing firms, with negative consequences for the wider economy. This study examines how water infrastructure copes with severe weather fluctuations and analyzes the effect of unreliable water supplies on the productivity of...

One reason that poor people may not capture the full benefit from participation in international markets is that the goods they produce tend to be subject to relatively high trade barriers. This paper analyzes market access barriers faced by households in different income deciles by matching...