This blog is a biweekly feature highlighting recent working papers from around the World Bank Group. It introduces five papers published from March 16 to March 31 on various topics, including…

Marcelo Buitron, Policy Research Working Paper team |

Cash transfers have been extensively used as a tool to soften the negative impacts of the COVID19 pandemic. A recent working paper uses data from a randomized cash transfer experiment in Guinea to…

Damien de Walque, Dimitris Mavridis |

Progress towards women’s entrepreneurial development has increased over the past ten years. However, female entrepreneurs continue to face multiple obstacles in their journey – one of them being…

Maereg Tewoldebirhan Alemayehu, Kavell Joseph |

Photo: shplendid | Flickr Creative Commons Talk of trade tariffs and heightened geopolitical tensions are dominating news headlines recently. As developed economies consider escalating…

Mark Moseley |

Myanmar in 2012, when we started our financial sector engagement, and Myanmar today seem like two different worlds. Back then, sim cards cost close to US$500, visitors carried wads of crisp, new…

Nagavalli Annamalai |

Understanding macroeconomic volatility part 3Read parts 1 & 2
There’s good evidence that a country’s level of financial development affects the impact of volatility on economic growth,…

Francisco G. Carneiro, Ha Minh Nguyen, Rei Odawara |

Understanding Macroeconomic Volatility: Part 2 The fact is that a government can soften a recession by increasing spending (the counter-cyclical approach) to raise demand and output. If government…

Francisco G. Carneiro, Ha Minh Nguyen, Rei Odawara |

Volatility in financial markets gets wide attention in the public eye. Less noticed is what we in the development world call macroeconomic volatility—faster-than-desired swings in the broad forces…

Francisco G. Carneiro, Ha Minh Nguyen, Rei Odawara |