Low tax compliance in low- and middle-income countries around the world limits the ability of governments to offer effective public services. This paper reports the results of a randomly rolled out text message campaign aimed at promoting tax compliance among landowners in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. L...

This report—the product of a joint working group convened by the Center for Global Development and the Inter-American Development Bank—focuses on firms and labor markets in Latin America and the Caribbean during the COVID-19 crisis and the highly uncertain recovery phase now underway. The ongoing Ru...

Many African countries, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa, continue to grapple with the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic while simultaneously confronting the challenges posed by slowing global growth, private capital outflows, debt distress, and the impacts of climate change. An estimate...

Multilateral development bank policy-based guarantees (PBGs) have long been an instrument in search of demand. First introduced in 1999 at the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development to help governments access market borrowing at attractive rates, their track-record has been uneven, an...

A well-known structural problem in Latin America is that firms are generally quite small and most workers in the region are concentrated in small firms. In recent years, about 32 percent of workers were self-employed, and of those working in firms, over 50 percent were in firms that employed 10 or f...

Global gatherings from Addis Ababa to Glasgow are setting targets from climate through health and education to energy and transport that call for a lot of investment for sustainable development. But how much you can afford to invest depends on how much you’re paying for it. And that’s where the simp...

We use new, detailed oil data and an event-study design to analyze political change in 36 oil-producing countries that experienced at least 10 years of declining production. We find that when their production starts to decline, they become significantly more democratic, relative to both the overall ...