Definitions of catch-up growth in anthropometric outcomes among young children vary across studies. This paper distinguishes between catch-up in the mean of a group toward that of a healthy reference population versus catch-up within the group, associated with a narrowing of the outcome...

The literature lends empirical support for the idea that improvements to transport infrastructure lead to economic development. How and why the benefits of better transport differ between genders is less clear. This paper attempts to answer this question by combining a nonexperimental impact...

Utilities the world over grapple with how to set prices to recover fixed costs. This paper considers optimal utility provision and pricing when consumers form habits without being aware of it. Data from a multi-year pricing experiment among nearly 1500 rural piped water customers in Vietnam...

Vietnam's power sector has developed rapidly since the 1990s to become a top performer among developing countries. This success has occurred mostly under a state-owned utility, Electricity Vietnam. Select market-oriented reforms to date have also had some positive impact. By the late 1990s, the...

Many developing countries lack spatially disaggregated price data. Some analysts use "no-price" methods by using a food Engel curve to derive the deflator as that needed for nominally similar households to have equal food shares in all regions and time periods. This method cannot be tested in...

A substantial literature has examined the impact of stress during the early stages of life on later-life health. This paper contributes to that literature by examining the later-life health impact of stress during adolescence and early adulthood, using a novel proxy for stress: risk of military...

This paper looks at the structural marginalization of ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities in six pilot economies (Bulgaria, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, Tanzania, and Vietnam) and proposes a new methodology for collecting cross-country comparable data on antidiscrimination legal...

Developing countries made considerable gains during the first decade of the 21st century. Their economies grew at unprecedented rates, resulting in large reduction in extreme poverty and a significant expansion of the middle class. But more recently that progress has slowed with an economic...

Education is central to the development of human capital. Vietnam has made significant progress. This paper reviews existing research on the returns to education and makes the case for investment in schooling. In Vietnam, the returns to schooling are 10 percent overall. The returns to primary...

Food consumed outside the home in restaurants or other food establishments is a growing segment of consumption in many developing countries. However, the survey methods that are utilized to collect data on expenditures on food away from home are often simplistic and could potentially result in...