The most vulnerable households in Latin America and the Caribbean have been disproportionately affected by the Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, endangering the region's inclusive development path. High-Frequency Phone Surveys show that two months into the pandemic, in May 2020, the gaps between...

Colombia has reduced extreme poverty in the past 16 years by almost half, moderate poverty by 22 percentage points, and made more than four million Colombians jump the threshold of multidimensional poverty. However, it remains one of the most unequal countries in the region, after Brazil and...

Housing is the largest durable good consumed by households. As such, any consumption-based measure of welfare, to be comprehensive, must include the value of the flow of services households derive from their dwellings, the so-called imputed rent. However, estimating imputed rents is a daunting...

This paper uses a panel of firms from the Mexican Economic Censuses and analyzes at the microeconomic level how labor markets adapt to the adoption of information and communication technologies. The paper studies the effects of the adoption of information and communication technologies over the...

This paper provides novel evidence on the impact of changes in energy prices on manufacturing performance in two large developing economies-Indonesia and Mexico. It finds that unlike increases in electricity prices, which harm plants' performance, fuel price hikes result in higher productivity...

This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the short-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on businesses worldwide with a focus on developing countries. The results are based on a novel data set collected by the World Bank Group and several partner institutions in 51 countries covering...