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Blog Post
October 20, 2020
Governments around the world have taken drastic measures to control the spread of coronavirus. Public debate has understandably focused on the differences across countries; however, there has been surprising uniformity in the severity of lockdowns and other containment measures between rich and poor...
WORKING PAPERS
October 20, 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic led governments around the world to impose unprecedented restrictions on economic activity. Were these restrictions equally justified in poorer countries with fewer demographic risk factors and less ability to weather economic shocks? We develop, validate, and estimate a fully ...
Blog Post
June 29, 2020
Last week, the IMF revised the post-COVID growth forecasts it had made originally in the April World Economic Outlook (WEO). The April growth forecasts numbers projected a significantly more optimistic outlook for EMDEs compared with advanced economies. It turns out that the latest June forecast ma...
WORKING PAPERS
May 14, 2020
The IMF’s forecasts of GDP growth in 2020 suggest a substantially muted impact of the COVID crisis for developing countries compared to advanced economies. We hope that the relative optimism will not induce complacency and elicit a less-than-forceful response by countries themselves nor legitim...
Blog Post
November 07, 2017
As economic indicators deteriorate, the Tanzanian government has jailed an opposition leader for questioning the Bank of Tanzania's growth statistics. It's time for the World Bank and the IMF to speak up. If it's illegal to question a government's statistics, why should anyone trust ...
WORKING PAPERS
June 13, 2017
Public employees in many developing economies earn much higher wages than similar private-sector workers. These wage premia may reflect an efficient return to effort or unobserved skills, or an inefficient rent causing labor misallocation. To distinguish these explanations, we exploit the Kenyan gov...
Feb
2
2017
12:30—2:00 PM
January 26, 2017
The city of Bogotá set out to reduce crime and increase state legitimacy by raising state presence on city streets: either increasing police time by two thirds, or delivering clean up and lighting services. In their new paper, Christopher Blattman and his co-authors find that these large and ...