Low utilization of household credit in developing countries may be partially due to religious considerations. In a randomized marketing experiment in Jordan, this paper estimates the effect of sharia-compliant loan features on demand for credit. To comply with Islamic law, the sharia-compliant...

It is known that Muslim women in Nigeria have significantly worse nutritional status than their Christian counterparts. The paper first shows that this difference is explained by covariates including geographic location, ethnicity, household wealth, and women?s education. However, on accounting...

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...

This paper examines whether the son preference and fertility behavior of Muslim couples respond to the risk of inheritance expropriation by their extended family. According to traditional Islamic inheritance principles, only the son of a deceased man can exclude his male agnates from inheritance...

This paper studies the role of morality in the decision to repay debts. Using a field experiment with a large Islamic bank in Indonesia, the paper finds that moral appeals strongly increase credit card repayments. In this setting, all of the bank's late-paying credit card customers receive a...

Public enterprises (PEs) earn an average 10 percent of GDP in developing countries. Many governments are reexamining the role of the state, so questions about whether to divest PEs or make them more efficient are likely to intensify. The Bank will increasingly be called upon for advice and...

The world is faced with considerable risk and uncertainty about climate change. Particular attention has been paid increasingly to hydropower generation in recent years because it is renewable energy. However, hydropower is among the most vulnerable industries to changes in global and regional...

This paper estimates a dynamic business growth equation on a sample of small-scale manufacturers. The results suggest that excessive labor regulation, power shortages, and problems of access to finance are significant influences on industrial growth in India. The expected annual sales growth...

This paper studies the relationship between the growth of China and India in world merchandise trade and Latin American and Caribbean commercial flows from two perspectives. First, the authors focus on the opportunity that China and India's markets have offered Latin American and Caribbean...