South Sudan has suffered multiple shocks in 2020, potentially derailing an economic recovery and peace building process. The FY21 budget seeks to stabilize the economy, provide basic services, consolidate peace, and address Coronavirus (COVID-19) effects. While South Sudan is currently faced...

The Sierra Leone Economic Update (SLEU) reports on and analyzes recent economic developments and policies within medium-term, regional, and global contexts and analyzes the implications of these developments and policies for the outlook of the economy. Macroeconomic imbalance worsened in 2017...

Which cities have the highest risk of human and economic losses due to natural hazards? And how will urban exposure to major hazards change over the coming decades? This paper develops a global urban disaster risk index that evaluates the mortality and economic risks from disasters in 1,943...

A large literature documents the positive influence of a city's skill structure on its rate of economic growth. By contrast, the effect of a city's age structure on its economic growth has been a hitherto largely neglected area of research. This paper hypothesizes that cities with more...

The Philippines' economic growth outlook remains positive, yet downside risks have increased. An expected slowdown in global trade in the medium term is likely to further dampen Philippine exports. Nevertheless, baseline economic growth is projected at 6.5 percent in 2018, 6.7 percent in 2019,...

Following an initial spike in early 2018, Armenia's economic performance slowed during the rest of the year, but still estimated to have above 5 percent growth for the year. Inflationary pressures remained low, while the external balances deteriorated. The overperformance of the fiscal accounts...

Cambodia's economy continues to show signs of robust growth, underpinned by solid export performance and strong domestic demand. Key macroeconomic data for the first six-months, however, indicate a slight deceleration of economic activity this year, compared to a strong growth performance of 7.5...

The Philippines economy posted robust growth in early 2010, in part due to large one-off factors. As did many countries in the region, the Philippines benefited from a strong rebound in global trade. Manufacturing and investment activity expanded briskly as a result. Private consumption...

This paper studies long-term impacts of violent conflict, to provide insights into the costs of conflict and policies to prevent conflict relapse. The findings link evidence on the contemporaneous effects of conflict with its persistent impact, especially by combining multiple data sources such...

Traditional risk assessments use asset losses as the main metric to measure the severity of a disaster. This paper proposes an expanded risk assessment based on a framework that adds socioeconomic resilience and uses wellbeing losses as its main measure of disaster severity. Using a new,...