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FEATURED

Award Announcement, March 2025 

Sandra Rozo, Senior Economist at the Poverty, Inequality, and Human Development team at DECRG, received the for her impactful research on forced migration in Colombia and the broader region. Her work has significantly advanced the understanding of migration¡¯s social, economic, and political effects, influencing public policy design and implementation. For an overview of her research on this topic, read Sandra¡¯s recently published VoxDevLit on

Call for Papers, Submit by December 15, 2024 

Humans was created to improve the dissemination of high-quality research in the specific area of Migration in Latin America. Although the predominant focus of the conference is on work related to migration (internal and international) for the Latin American region, papers for any country are also welcome. Both theoretical and empirical contributions are welcome too. The deadline for submitting complete papers is December 15, 2024. The conference will be held at ITAM, Mexico City from April 10-11, 2025.

Keynote Presentation, January 19, 2024

In this keynote presentation, Vijayendra Rao talks about "reflexive policymaking", which argues that local control should be given to local issues. Additionally, Rao shares that this paradigm of policymaking emphasizes that people who are impacted by policy decisions should be centrally involved in forming the policies that affect their rights. This presentation focuses on four central themes: 1) deliberation, 2) democratizing data, 3) incentivizing politicians, and 4) the added value of local democracy. 

Strengthening Health Systems for Pandemic Preparedness and Other Emerging Challenges

Policy Research Talk, February 6, 2024

While the world appears to have transitioned out of the COVID-19 pandemic, its impact on society and health systems has been profound. In this talk, World Bank Lead Economist Damien de Walque highlights and discusses some of the lessons learned through this crisis and the response to it. Stressing how beneficial the investments in health¡ªincluding vaccination¡ªhave been during the pandemic, he also places the disruption brought by COVID-19 in perspective with the current evolving burden of diseases in low- and middle-income countries.

Brief, 2024

It is estimated that by early 2021, there were more than 110 million displaced people, of whom 41% are children under the age of 18. One of the main obstacles to progress in this field is the lack of longitudinal data and information on the human development status of children. The Longitudinal Survey of Forced Migrant Children (VenRePs-Kids) was developed to contribute in this direction.

 |   |  Life out of the Shadows (Feature Story)

Oyebola Okunogbe recently won the Best Paper Award from the American Economic Association for her paper ¡°Technology, Taxation, and Corruption¡± alongside co-author Victor Pouliquen. They use experimental variation to examine the impact of electronic tax filing (to replace in-person submission to tax officials) using data from Tajikistan firms. The pair of researchers find that e-filing reduces the time firms spend on taxes by 40 percent. Further, among firms previously more likely to evade, e-filing doubles taxes paid.

 |   |  Feature Story |  Policy Research Talk |  More Research from Oyebola Okunogbe

LATEST WORKING PAPERS

Vijayendra Rao, Michael Woolcock
World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 11087, March 2025

Nicol¨¢s Cabra-Ruiz, Sandra V. Rozo, Mar¨ªa Micaela Sviatschi
World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 11049, January 2025

Abdulrazzak Tamim, Emma Smith, I. Bailey Palmer, Edward Miguel, Samuel Leone, Sandra V. Rozo, Sarah Stillman
World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 11042, January 2025

Quy-Toan Do, Michael Lokshin, Martin Ravallion
World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 11017, January 2025

Bernice Nuerkey Narh, Michael Woolcock
World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 10979, November 2024

LATEST JOURNAL ARTICLES

S Anukriti, Maurizio Bussolo, Jean Lee, Siddharth Sharma, and Anaise Williams
Journal of Development Economics, Forthcoming

Quy-Toan Do, Hanan G Jacoby
The Review of Economic Studies, rdae074, December 2024 |

Laura A Ruiz-Gaona, Jed Friedman, Nejma Cheikh, Thomas Wilkinson, Mengxiao Wang, Jasmine Vicencio, Sohail Agha, Marelize Gorgens
Oxford Open Digital Health, vol. 2, December 2024

Roy van der Weide, Brian Blankespoor, Chris Elbers, Peter Lanjouw
Journal of Development Economics, vol. 171, October 2024 | 

Benoit Marie A Decerf, Fran?ois Maniquet
Scandinavian Journal of Economics, October 2024 | 

Caitlin Hemlock, Emanuela Galasso, Ann M. Weber, Tsirery Christian Randriamiarisoa, Mathilde Col, Maria Dieci, Lisy Ratsifandrihamanana, Lia C.H. Fernald
BMC Public Health, vol. 24, September 2024

Marisol Rodriguez Chatruc, Sandra Rozo
Journal of Development Economics, vol. 140, September 2024 | 

BOOKS AND REPORTS

VoxDevLit (Literature Review), March 2025 |

Forced displacement has reached unprecedented levels, with over 120 million individuals displaced globally as of 2024 due to conflict, violence, climate change, and human rights violations. This review underscores the importance of transitioning from humanitarian aid to self-reliance models, closing policy implementation gaps, and tailoring interventions to local contexts.

Book Chapter, 2025

Considering the three main dimensions of social protection (social assistance, social insurance, and labor market access) this literature review generates an index for overall refugee social protection access in 30 countries. The 30 host countries in the study account for 55% of the world¡¯s inflow of refugees, Palestinian refugees, and other people in need of international help as of 2022. This book chapter appendix is from the forthcoming Handbook of Social Protection.

Book Chapter, 2023

Governments across the world make thousands of personnel management decisions, procure millions of goods and services, and execute billions of processes each day. Responding effectively and with professional integrity to public administration¡¯s many challenges requires recognizing that access to more and better quantitative data is necessary, but insufficient. This chapter, from The Government Analytics Handbook, focuses on four risks which can come from an overreliance on quantitative data.

This chapter, co-authored by Michael Woolcock, appears in the book Oxford Handbook of Social Program Design and Implementation Evaluation. The book creates a comprehensive and actionable toolbox of evaluation methodologies that can be used to examine social programs throughout their life cycle.

World Development Report 2023: Migrants, Refugees, and Societies
Report, 2023

Mobility is an integral part of the development process. It is a mechanism for reallocating labor across economic sectors and geographical areas. It enables adaptation to shocks, stresses, and imbalances. Cross-border mobility inevitably comes with economic and social consequences for those who move, their communities of origin, and their destinations. The World Development Report (WDR) is taking a fresh look at these issues. It aims to shift from a narrow focus on labor markets for migrants and legal protection for refugees to a more holistic perspective ¡ª one that recognizes the humanity of migrants and the complexity of the societies of origin and destination.

 |   |   |  WDR 2023 Learning Events

All development is about people: the transformative process to equip, link, and enable groups of people to drive change and create something new to benefit society. Social Sustainability in Development: Meeting the Challenges of the 21st Century seeks to advance the concept of social sustainability and sharpen its analytical foundations. By identifying interventions that work to promote the components of social sustainability and highlighting the evidence of their links to key development outcomes, this book provides a foundation for using social sustainability to help address the many challenges of our time.

Report, March 2023

The COVID-19 pandemic has struck businesses across the globe with unprecedented impacts. The world economy has been hit hard and firms have experienced a myriad of challenges, but these challenges have been heterogeneous across firms. This paper examines one important dimension of this heterogeneity: the differential effect of the pandemic on women-led and men-led businesses.

Improving Effective Coverage in Health: Do Financial Incentives Work?

Policy Research Report, May 2022

Improving Effective Coverage in Health: Do Financial Incentives Work? examines one specific policy approach to improving effective coverage: financial incentives in the form of performance-based financing (PBF), a package reform that typically includes performance pay to frontline health workers as well as facility autonomy, transparency, and community engagement.

Feature Story |  Policy Research Talk Video | Launch Event

Last Updated: Apr 08, 2025