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Blog Post
May 01, 2024
At the core of African food insecurity are the continent’s notoriously low crop yields—the amount of produce farmers harvest relative to the area of land they farm. And one of the main reasons for low yield compared to other regions is that African countries, on average, use far less fertilizer to b...
WORKING PAPERS
April 04, 2024
Star firms, defined as the top 10 percentile of firms in the world in terms of return on invested capital, are more likely to occur in high-income countries and manufacturing industry, but there is an increasing share of star firms from middle-income countries and the services sector. Star firms hav...
Blog Post
April 04, 2024
A large academic and policy debate has focused on the increase in market concentration over the past few decades which has given rise to “star firms,” a small set of firms that generate abnormal returns for their investors. A common concern is that these firms exert excess market power and behave as...
Blog Post
December 06, 2023
Men are the majority customers in bank lending portfolios throughout the world. The gender gap in access to credit is larger in developing countries and especially onerous for women entrepreneurs who suffered disproportionate employment and income losses during the recent COVID pandemic. What drives...
Blog Post
November 30, 2023
The latest climate COP, or “Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change,” got underway today in Dubai. It will be attended by thousands of delegates from governments, the private sector, media, and civil society, with two hectic weeks of events and negotiat...
Blog Post
November 09, 2023
There are so many studies regarding so many aspects of development economics that it can be difficult to keep up. Last week was the North East Universities Development Consortium annual conference, often called NEUDC. Researchers presented more than 130 papers across a wide range of topics, from agr...
Blog Post
October 05, 2023
A year ago, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced that an alarming 60 percent of developing countries and 25 percent of emerging market economies were either in debt distress or at severe risk of default. The confluence of severe shocks in the period 2020-22, starting with the COVID-19 pan...
WORKING PAPERS
October 05, 2023
This paper uses a straightforward Resilience Indicator, constructed from a small set of economic and institutional variables, to show that by 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent global shocks, it was possible to identify emerging markets and developing countries that would encounter ...