Improving the resilience of the economy in the face of uncertain climate change damages involves irreversible investments to scale up new technologies that are less vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The benefit of having such options includes the avoided welfare cost of diverting...

This paper documents the existence of a "middle-income trap" for the Middle East and North Africa region. It argues that the economic woes of the Middle East and North Africa offer new insights into the debate on the trap which has thus far focused on the East Asia and Pacific region. The...

This paper analyzes the simultaneous impacts and interplay of exports and technology adoption on the demand for different types of skills and aggregate labor market indicators in Indonesia over a period characterized by a commodity boom (2005-10) and a period of declining exports (2011-15). The...

Thousands of scenarios are used to provide updated estimates for the impacts of climate change on extreme poverty in 2030. The range of the number of people falling into poverty due to climate change is between 32 million and 132 million in most scenarios. These results are commensurate with...

This paper examines the interaction between macro-financial and climate-related risks. It brings together different strands of the literature on climate-related risks and how these relate to macro-financial management and risks. Physical impacts of climate change as well as the transition toward...

Top-down economic models, such as computable general equilibrium models, are the common tools to assess the economic impacts of climate change policies. However, these models are incapable of representing the detailed technological characteristics of the sources of greenhouse gas emissions. The...

This paper considers the impacts of "finance blending" whereby climate finance is added to international carbon markets for offset trading. The paper first discusses climate finance and the carbon market as free-standing finance solutions by high-income countries to increase mitigation in...

Understanding the magnitude and importance of income shocks, such as drought or conflict, in causing and perpetuating poverty is critical to designing policies aimed at building resilience and contributing toward the goal of ending poverty. This paper uses micro-data from two waves of the Somali...

This paper combines remote-sensed data and individual child-, mother-, and household-level data from the Demographic and Health Surveys for five countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (Malawi, Tanzania, Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe) to design a prototype drought-contingent targeting framework that...