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What are the common characteristics among radicalized individuals, willing to justify attacks targeting civilians? Drawing on information on attitudes toward extreme violence and other characteristics of 30,787 individuals from 27 developing countries around the world, and employing a variety of econometric techniques, this paper identifies the partial correlates of extremism. The results suggest that the typical extremist who supports attacks against civilians is more likely to be young, unemployed and struggling to make ends meet, relatively uneducated, and not as religious as others, but more willing to sacrifice own life for his or her beliefs. Gender and marital status are not found to explain significantly the individual-level variation in attitudes toward extremism. Although these results may vary in magnitude and significance across countries and geographic regions, they are robust to various sensitivity analyses.

Education --- Labor Policies --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Poverty Reduction --- Science and Technology Development --- Social Protections and Labor

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Although child mortality rates have declined all across the developing world over the past 40 years, they have declined the most in the Middle East and North Africa region. This paper documents this remarkable experience and shows that it is broad based in the sense that all countries in the Middle East and North Africa experienced significant declines in child mortality over this period and each country did better than most of its comparators. In looking for the sources of the region's performance edge, the paper confirms the importance of such determinants of child mortality as income growth, education stock, public spending on health, urbanization, and food sufficiency. In addition, the paper establishes that the initial level of mortality has a substantial influence on the pace of subsequent child mortality decline. Of these factors, food sufficiency status is found to contribute to the region's performance edge over all developing regions, while the other factors are found to matter to varying degrees in selected pairwise regional comparisons.

Adolescent Health --- Child Mortality --- Early Child and Children's Health --- Economic Development --- Food Subsidies --- Health Monitoring & Evaluation --- Health, Nutrition and Population --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Population Policies --- Public Health Spending

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This paper investigates whether banking crises are associated with declines in bilateral exports. We first develop a simple open economy model in which banking crises translate into negative liquidity shocks, leading to collapses in exports through supply-side and demand-side shocks. We then estimate a gravity model using a sample of developed and developing countries over the period 1988-2010. The results suggest that crisis-hit countries experience lower levels of bilateral exports, particularly in developing countries where supply-side shocks are found to be relatively more important than demand shocks. In developing countries, exports of manufactured goods are disproportionately hurt by banking crises and this negative effect is stronger in industries relying more on external finance. These findings are robust to correcting for potential endogeneity, to changes in the sample, and to alternative estimation methods.

Exports. --- Banks and banking. --- Agricultural banks --- Banking --- Banking industry --- Commercial banks --- Depository institutions --- Finance --- Financial institutions --- Money --- International trade --- Banks and Banking --- Exports and Imports --- Financial Risk Management --- Macroeconomics --- Empirical Studies of Trade --- Financial Crises --- Trade: General --- Economic & financial crises & disasters --- International economics --- Banking crises --- Exports --- Financial crises --- Trade balance --- Global financial crisis of 2008-2009 --- Balance of trade --- Global Financial Crisis, 2008-2009 --- United States