This paper describes the coverage and representativeness of Orbis, a commercial database of firm-level records across many countries. Such databases can provide key insights into global economic trends and shed light on how policies affect firms within and across countries. As a benchmark, the...

This paper re-examines the determinants and consequences of redistribution in light of improved data and methods relative to earlier literature. In particular, we use the latest version of the UNU-WIDER' Income Inequality Database to have the best available estimates of both pre- and...

This paper studies the short-term and long-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for productivity in Europe. Aggregate and sectoral evidence is complemented by firm-level data-based findings obtained from a large microdistributed exercise. Productivity trends during the COVID-19 pandemic...

Over the past decade, research explaining cross country income differences has increasingly pointed to the dominant role of total factor productivity (TFP) gaps as opposed to factor accumulation. Nevertheless, it is a widely held belief that a country's ability to absorb and implement...

We examine how the services sector could provide decent and gainful employment in developing Asia. Using living wages as a reference point, we report that a significant portion of the workforce in developing Asian economies, the majority of which are employed in the agricultural sector, are not...

The main goal of the study is to identify the scope and trends in the manufacturing development of Russia and other countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in the context of integration effectiveness, industrial policies quality and competitiveness growth. Under current...

This paper examines how the services sector could provide decent and gainful employment in developing Asia. Using living wages as a reference point, this paper reports that a significant portion of the workforce in developing Asian economies, the majority of which are employed in the...

The conventional view of structural transformation is informed by three stylized facts of economic development: (i) all economies exhibit declining employment in agriculture, (ii) all economies exhibit a hump-shaped share of employment in industry, and (iii) all economies exhibit an increasing...

This paper assesses the role played by country specific factors as determinants of exports' diversification process. Using a panel data-set for 60 countries and twenty years (1985-2004) we confirm that even after clearing out differences in income per capita, cross section variability in the...