Global terrorist organizations attract radicalized individuals across borders and constitute a threat for both sending and receiving countries. The paper provides plausibly-identified evidence on the drivers of transnational terrorist recruitment. Using unique personnel records from the Islamic...

Accurately measuring oil production in low-governance contexts is an important task. Many terrorist organizations and insurgencies -- including the Islamic State group, also known as ISIL/ISIS or Daesh -- tap oil as a revenue source. Understanding spatial and temporal variation in production in...

This paper uses a global computable general-equilibrium framework with new detail on six Levant countries -- the Arab Republic of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, the Syrian Arab Republic, and Turkey -- to quantify the direct and indirect economic effects of the Syrian war and the advance of the...

Decades of conflict have contributed to high flows of internal displacement in Iraq. The incidence of these flows on the welfare of internally displaced persons is not well understood. This paper attempts to fill this gap in the literature by investigating the link between internal displacement...

Subsidized or free distribution of food has been a central pillar of social protection programs in many countries. With the number of forcibly displaced persons at record levels, the question arises of whether in-kind food transfer programs are effective in mitigating the loss of welfare induced...

The Iraqi Public Distribution System is the largest universal, in-kind subsidy system in the world. In 2012, the Public Distribution System transfers accounted for as much as 30 percent of incomes of the poorest 10 percent of the Iraqi population and provided 70 percent of the calories of the...

Iraq was plunged into two simultaneous crises in the second half of 2014, one driven by a sharp decline in oil prices, the other, by the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The severity and recurrent nature of these crises demand a fast understanding and quantification of their...

Since the early 1980s, Turkey has been going through a rapid urbanization process at a pace beyond the World average. This paper aims at assessing the impact of this rapid urbanization process on the country's sector productivity. The authors built a database combining two-digit manufacturing...

There is a common perception that low productivity or low growth is due to what can be called an quot;innovation shortfallquot;, usually identified as a low rate of investment in research and development (Ramp;D) when compared with some high innovation countries. The usual reaction to this...

This paper investigates the role of services in the household response to trade reforms in Vietnam. The relative response of the households and income growth after a major trade liberalization in rice are analyzed aiming to answer the following questions: What type of households, in which...