Timely data availability is a long-standing challenge in policy-making and analysis for low-income developing countries. This paper explores the use of Google Trends' data to narrow such information gaps and finds that online search frequencies about a country significantly correlate with...

Pacific island countries are exposed to significant risks from natural disasters. As adisaster relief measure, Fiji allowed pre-retirement pension withdrawls in the wake ofCyclone Winston in 2016. Motivated by this policy action, we provide a normativeanalysis of the use of early pension...

Minimum trace reconciliation, developed by Wickramasuriya et. al. (2019), is an innovation in the literature of forecast reconciliation. The proof, however, is indirect and not easy to extend to more general situations. This paper provides an alternative proof based on the first-order condition...

In developing economies, a shift to working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic varies substantially. An increase in teleworking days per week ranges from 0.7 to 17.6 percentage points across 10 developing countries covered by an online survey to about 500 respondents per country. An...