This paper discusses cultural barriers to women's participation and success in the labor market in developing countries. I begin by describing how gender norms influence the relationship between economic development and female employment, as well as how gender norms differ substantially across...

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...

This paper presents a synopsis of the contextual conditions, factors and challenges under which the recent evolution of tax systems has taken place over the past three decades. The paper gives especial emphasis to the role of natural endowments, political economy, social structure and history,...

Success in development over the past half-century was based on manufacturing-led export growth. Because the share of global employment in manufacturing will decline, manufacturing won't play the same role in the coming decades. An increase in manufacturing employment won't suffice to meet the...

There are large volumes of gas offshore Tanzania, which has raised hopes of a boom. But those hopes look set to be disappointed. A boom would depend on there being a sizeable flow of revenue to government from producing and exporting gas. This paper sets out the scale of the gas, and the array...

A significant natural resource discovery creates excited popular expectations of imminent wealth. But the size of a boom is usually overestimated and the delay in receiving revenues is underestimated. This paper takes stock of the sequencing, timing, and scale of the development of a natural...

The majority of the world's poor, by income poverty and multi-dimensional poverty, now live in countries officially classified by the World Bank as middle-income countries. Of course nothing happens when a country crosses a (somewhat) arbitrary threshold in per capita income but it does matter...

The management of revenues from exhaustible natural resources involves a number of challenges. In this paper, we argue that the standard policy advice to managers of resource revenues has been dominated by short-termism and the lack of a perspective on economic development and structural...

Average adult height is a physical measure of the biological standard of living of a population. While the biological and economic standards of living of a population are very different concepts, they are linked and may empirically move together. If this is so, then cohort heights can also be...