This paper provides a preliminary assessment of COVID-19's impact on global poverty in the light of the IMF's April 2020 growth forecasts. The analysis shows that the pandemic will have dramatic consequences, eroding many of the gains recorded over the last decade in terms of poverty reduction....

This paper provides a basic understanding of the nature of emerging key information and communication technologies, and establishes the distance of countries from high-quality access to the internet - the necessary threshold one needs to cross in order to make use of such technologies. The paper...

We investigate the marginal productivity of investment across countries. The aim is to estimate the return on investments financed by foreign aid and by domestic resource mobilization, using aggregate data. Both returns are expected to vary across countries and time. Consequently we develop a...

Aid is not generally aimed at the poorest people, though most multilateral or bilateral agencies would like to think they get included. However, donors’ strategies are generally blind to differentiation among the poor, and have not improved in this respect. The special provisions for the least...

This paper investigates the relationship between taxation and firm performance in developing countries. Taking firm-level data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys (WBES) and tax data from the Government Revenue Dataset (ICTD/UNU-WIDER), our results suggest that tax revenue benefits to firm...

Having a birth certificate is a stepping stone to acquiring an array of rights and benefits, including other documents necessary to navigate in and outside of one's home country. Despite its importance, many children in the developing world never obtain a birth certificate. Whether one does so...

This paper investigates how two effects drive wedges between nominal and real inequality estimates. The effects are caused by (i) differences in the composition of consumption over the income distribution coupled with differential inflation of consumption items; and (ii) quantity discounting...

This paper discusses the recent history of education aid policy. It highlights an important shift in policy thinking in the international aid architecture that has dominated the global education aid agenda since the early 1990s. It argues that Rawlsian principles of social justice, human rights...

This paper offers a critical review of the methods used to estimate the extent of capital flight and illicit financial flows from developing countries. The largest estimates in the literature are based on imperfect methods with a great margin for error. Emerging new studies have built on...

This paper discusses the emergence of two new middles since the Cold War, namely middle-income countries and people living above absolute poverty but below a security-from poverty-line. The paper sets out what has happened. It is argued that although there has been substantial economic growth,...