Publications

As the pandemic accelerates, governments must also protect other essential health services. Already, there have been numerous reports of disrupted access to services ranging from labor and delivery and immunization to HIV and tuberculosis care to dialysis and cancer treatment—most notably in countries with strict lockdowns. Initial estimates paint a grim picture of the potential magnitude of negative impacts on health outcomes due to these disruptions.

Over the past two decades, China has become a major global lender, with outstanding debt claims from direct loans and trade advances alone exceeding 1.5 percent of world GDP. This surge in lending has financed many projects in infrastructure, mining, and energy. The problem is that there is little official data beyond those aggregate numbers, mainly because China has not released a breakdown of its lending activities.

Many prominent people have advocated that the IMF undertake an “SDR allocation” to assist countries in dealing with the global financial crisis brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. If IMF shareholders show some leadership and bureaucratic flexibility, there are ways to allay the American government’s concerns and quickly get liquidity in the hands of countries who desperately need it.

While there has been much interest and investment in developing epidemic vaccines and medicines to combat emerging infectious disease threats, there has been less attention to how we will manage and allocate the global supply of efficacious vaccines and treatments once we have them. The launch of the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator marks an unprecedented commitment to global collaboration to ensure rapid and equitable access to medical countermeasures for COVID-19, such as vaccines and treatments.

This note updates and builds on analysis from 2014 by Stefan Dercon, which projects carbon dioxide emissions by the poorest countries to understand their likely future contribution to global emissions. Whilst these countries’ emissions are currently very low, there is concern that rapid economic growth could alter this picture.

Given the massive uncertainty surrounding how COVID-19 will play out in terms of health outcomes as well as economic and social outcomes, policymaking is as hard as it can possibly be. No-regret policies are those that are worth doing now regardless of which scenario actually plays out.

In this paper, we estimate short- and long-term tax buoyancy for 44 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries during 1980-2017 using time series and panel techniques.

With a little more care to take context and the confounding attributes that make female-headed households (FHHs) particularly prone to poverty into account, this paper argues that headship can be useful for identifying poor households in Africa.