How do international economic agreements influence the investment patterns of firms from emerging economies? This paper studies the ways in which bilateral investment treaties and preferential trade agreements interact with geographic and cultural distance to influence firms' investment...

This paper examines the influence of sovereign credit ratings and relative risk ratings on private capital flows to 26 emerging and frontier market economies, using quarterly data for 1998-2017. A dynamic panel regression model is used to estimate the relationship between ratings and capital...

This paper provides evidence on the labor productivity growth and employment impacts of foreign direct investment in selected countries in Africa over the years 2001-2012. It uses data from five emerging economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and advanced countries (Canada,...

Recent research on productivity spillovers from affiliates of multinational corporations in developing and emerging economies finds that backward linkages from affiliates of foreign-owned firms to local suppliers constitute the main channel transmitting productivity spillovers. This finding has...

Unexpected adverse events that affect areas or populations widely (covariate shocks) can have major consequences for the welfare of a society. Although the negative effects on households, especially among the poor, are well established in the economics literature, fewer studies have focused on...

This paper analyzes power utilities in 15 jurisdictions to understand the determinants of success for reforms aimed at improving financial viability and cost recovery in the power sector and the impacts of these reforms on metrics of sector performance. The analysis finds that electricity...

This paper develops a classification of investor risks and surveys 51 private investors and financiers in the power sector in Sub-Saharan Africa. The paper aims for a better understanding of what can be done to attract private solutions to fill the investment gap. It finds that the average...

According to conventional wisdom, capital flows are fickle. Focusing on emerging markets, this paper asks whether this conventional wisdom still holds in the contemporary world. The results show that, despite recent structural and regulatory changes, much of it survives. FDI inflows are more...

Foreign direct investment may play an important role in transferring technologies from high-income to emerging economies, which can lead to uneven effects on the wages of skilled and unskilled workers. This paper combines project-level data on greenfield foreign direct investment with household...