With a new development framework under way and an increasingly urgent need to address political, socioeconomic and environmental issues on a global scale, this is a critical moment for the international development agenda. Almost 15 years after the Millennium Declaration, a new phase for...

We estimate the community-level impact of foreign aid projects on women's empowerment in the country with the most complete recent record of geo-coded aid project placement, Malawi. Our estimates can thus be interpreted as the average impact of aid from many different donors and diverse...

Using a large, original database of 385 politically connected firms under the Mubarak regime in Egypt, we document for the first time the negative impact of cronyism on economic growth. In the early 2000s, a policy shift in Egypt led to the expansion of crony activities into new, previously...

Even though it is well documented that privatization leads to an improvement in the performance of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) following divestiture, it is argued that the existing literature suffers from a misspecification measure because it does not consider the performance of control firms...

During the last few years and because of the low oil prices in particular, the increasing awareness of the unsustainability of subsidized systems led several MENA countries to take steps to lower subsidies, which have been part of the social contract for decades, especially as far as the energy...

The study has surveyed the post-Arab Spring youth employment policies that have been adopted in Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, and Tunisia. In addition, the study examines whether and how the economic policies implemented in these countries led to high levels of youth unemployment prior to the Arab...