With growing international skilled labor mobility, education and migration decisions have become increasingly inter-related, and potentially have a large impact on the growth trajectories of source countries, through their effects on labor supply, savings, or the cost of education. The authors...

This paper uses a sample of 73 developing countries to estimate the change in the cost of alleviating urban poverty brought about by the recent increase in food prices. This cost is approximated by the change in the poverty deficit, that is, the variation in financial resources required to...

During the past four and a half years, the number of Palestinian workers in the Israeli labor market how significantly contracted primarily as a result of restrictions on the movement of Palestinian labor imposed by the Government of Israel. The restricted access of Palestinian workers to the...

Using recent data on concentration indexes, we estimate that rents accruing from monopolistic positions represent more than 16 percent of GDP in Lebanon. In turn, using an applied computable general equilibrium model, we compare the long term impact of raising domestic competition with that of...

The double-dividend debate evolves around the possibility (or not) of substituting environmental taxes for more distortionary taxes to reduce both pollution degradation and/or damages (the first dividend) and the excess burden of existing taxes (the second dividend), without eroding tax...

This paper attempts to identify Lebanon's greatest constraints to economic growth, following a growth diagnosis approach. It concludes that fiscal imbalances and barriers to entry are most binding on long-term growth. Macroeconomic imbalances and related perceived risks affect the nature of...

The three countries covered in this first report, Mali, Chad and Niger, share a number of common characteristics and face a similar set of challenges, which provides the foundation for this joint-review approach. All three are low-income landlocked economies. Each relies heavily on the...