Services are the fastest growing portion of world trade and now account for nearly a quarter of global exports. This presents opportunities for emerging economies to adapt and enter new markets. Many countries in southern Africa have struggled to diversify from a heavy reliance on primary...

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...

In very poor countries, inequality often means that a small part of the population maintains living standards far above the rest. This is also true for educational inequality in Mozambique: only a small segment of the population has access to higher levels of education (there are 30 times as...

This paper puts sub-Saharan Africa's economic development into perspective. While much did not go as hoped for at independence, much of the region has been on a more promising development trajectory since the mid-1990s, as we illustrate using growth, poverty, and human development indicators. We...

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...

This study presents new empirical results, using microdata from the LIS database, on development patterns in economic inequality for a set of countries that are less covered in the empirical literature, mostly due to the lack of appropriate data. After discussing the main challenges when...