The volume-based Special Safeguard Mechanism was proposed as essential for small, poor farmers and became the proximate cause of the collapse of the Doha Agenda negotiations in 2008. But is it helpful for these farmers, given that it is likely to be applied when farm output is depressed and many...

Most poor people in developing countries still live in rural areas and are primarily engaged in low productivity farming activities. Thus pathways out of poverty are likely to be strongly connected to productivity increases in the rural economy, whether they are realized in farming, in rural...

The authors use a Ricardian model to test the relationship between annual net revenues and climate across Israeli farms. They find that it is important to include the amount of irrigation water available to each farm in order to measure the response of farms to climate. With irrigation water...

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has halted economic activity worldwide, hurting firms and pushing them toward bankruptcy. This paper provides a unified framework to organize the policy debate related to firm financing during the downturn, centered along four main points. First, the economic...

This paper documents how firms in Arab countries issue equity, corporate bonds, and syndicated loans in domestic and international markets to obtain financing and grow. Using a new data set on issuance activity and firm performance, the paper finds that capital raising through these markets has...

Despite regulatory efforts designed to make it easier for firms to formalize, informality remains extremely high among firms in Sub-Saharan Africa. In most of the region, business registration in a national registry is separate from tax registration. This paper provides initial results from an...