Uganda's economy underwent significant structural change in the 2000s whereby the share of non-tradable services in aggregate employment rose by about 7 percentage points at the expense of the production of tradable goods. The process also involved a 12-percentage-point shift in employment away...

The degree of concentration and market power in South African markets has been the topic of much policy discussion. However, there has been little evidence on what drives market power and the impact of the degree of competition in South African markets on economic outcomes. This paper improves...

This paper explores the effect of oil shocks on electoral outcomes. Using a new polling and election data set for 207 elections across 50 democracies, the paper shows that oil price increases systematically lower the odds of reelection for incumbents. The analysis verifies that these shocks -...

The COVID-19-triggered collapse in oil prices in March and April 2020 was the seventh, and by far the most severe, in a series of such collapses since 1970. This paper, first, compares this most recent collapse and its drivers with previous ones in an event study. It finds that it was associated...

With the benefit of hindsight, this paper provides a fresh and comprehensive look at the causes of the 2014-16 collapse in oil prices and its impact on the global economy. It disentangles the contribution of supply and demand factors, assesses the impact on activity in oil exporters and oil...

The paper deals with the economics of sustainability associated with the transformation of energy markets. It emphasizes the interrelations between technical changes and energy markets and how in turn the resulting transformations alter the sustainability of economic systems that are dependent...

The outbreak of COVID-19 and the wide-ranging measures needed to slow its advance triggered an unprecedented collapse in oil demand, a surge in oil inventories, and a record one-month decline in oil prices in March 2020. This paper examines the likely implications of the 2020 oil price plunge...

This handbook has been developed to provide instruction on the design and implementation of incentives for resource-efficiency purposes. The target audience is World Bank staff and stakeholders who are supporting the implementation of a resource-efficiency program in a country on behalf of the...

This technical note implements a firm-level productivity diagnostic using the census of manufacturing firms and a large services survey in Kenya. By using a number of stylized productivity indicators, we aim to identify the ability of Kenyan firms to grow. The information presented in this...