One of the main challenges in low-income Asia and the Pacific countries is users' willingness to pay for water services. In contrast, investors and private operators in the water sector prefer a high rate of return. This has often led to the failure of public-private partnerships for water...

East Asian countries were seriously affected by the 2008 global crisis through a steep fall in exports. This experience exposed the vulnerability of the East Asian growth model and emphasized the importance of generating regional growth by expanding domestic demand and enlarging intra-regional...

East Asian countries were seriously affected by the 2008 global crisis through a steep fall in exports. This experience exposed the vulnerability of the East Asian growth model and emphasized the importance of generating regional growth by expanding domestic demand and enlarging intra-regional...

The story of South Asia is a topsy-turvy one. Soon after independence from British rule, the region seemed to have a much better prospect than many other parts of the Third World; the prospects soon dimmed, however, as South Asia crawled while East and Southeast Asia galloped away. But a large...

Over the past twenty years, Mozambique has achieved remarkable progress in promoting macroeconomic growth and stability. Nonetheless, poverty rates remain high and labour market activity is dominated by smallholder farming. We use recent household survey data to dig into these trends and provide...

The COVID-19 pandemic represents an unprecedented global crisis. The task for economic policy is to help keep people alive, enterprises afloat, and households out of poverty. The pandemic has macroeconomic dimensions. First, it affects macroeconomic stability and growth. Second, the tools of...

This paper introduces a new index of financial inclusion for 153 advanced, emerging, and developing economies using a comprehensive set of new indicators, grouped into four different dimensions: financial access, usage, financial development, and fintech infrastructure. The fintech...

This paper proposes an empirical framework that relates poverty reduction to production growth. We use the GGDC/UNU-WIDER Economic Transformation Database to measure the contribution to growth of productivity improvements within sectors and structural change-the reallocation of workers across...

The study presents recent global evidence on the transformation of economic growth to poverty reduction in developing countries, with emphasis on the role of income inequality. The focus is on the period since the early/mid-1990s when growth in these countries as a group has been relatively...