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Inadequate infrastructure impedes the productivity of manufacturing firms, with negative consequences for the wider economy. This study examines how water infrastructure copes with severe weather fluctuations and analyzes the effect of unreliable water supplies on the productivity of manufacturing firms, focusing predominately on firms in developing economies. This is achieved using firm-level data from World Bank Enterprise Surveys covering more than 16,000 manufacturing firms in a cross-section of 103 countries between 2009 and 2015. The study finds that periods of significantly low rainfall lead to higher water outages, and that the overall impact is driven by the effects of drought on low-income and lower-middle-income economies, with upper-middle-income and high-income economies benefitting from more resilient water infrastructure. Furthermore, the study finds that incidents of water outages lead to lower firm productivity for firms in less developed economies. For the average firm located in a low-income or lower-middle-income economy, one additional water outage incident per day in a typical month can lead to losses of approximately 8.2 percent of annual sales. This finding calls for increased policy focus on water infrastructure services, particularly in poorer countries where water infrastructure and firms seem to be particularly vulnerable to the vagaries of rainfall.

Business cycles and stabilization policies --- Common carriers industry --- Construction industry --- Drought --- Energy --- Energy policies and economics --- Environment --- Firm --- Firm productivity --- Firm-level analysis --- Food and beverage industry --- General manufacturing --- Hydrology --- Industry --- Macroeconomics and economic growth --- Natural disasters --- Plastics and rubber industry --- Pulp and paper industry --- Rainfall --- Textiles apparel and leather industry --- Water infrastructure --- Water resources --- Water supply and sanitation --- Water supply and systems

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Although Africa has experienced rapid urbanization in recent decades, we know little about the process of urbanization across the continent. The paper exploits a natural experiment, the abolition of South African pass laws, to explore how exogenous population shocks affect the spatial distribution of economic activity. Under apartheid, black South Africans were severely restricted in their choice of location and many were forced to live in homelands. Following the abolition of apartheid they were free to migrate. Given a migration cost in distance, a town nearer to the homelands will receive a larger inflow of people than a more distant town following the removal of mobility restrictions. Drawing upon this exogenous variation, the authors study the effect of migration on urbanization in South Africa. While they find that on average there is no endogenous adjustment of population location to a positive population shock, there is heterogeneity in these results. Cities that start off larger do grow endogenously in the wake of a migration shock, while rural areas that start off small do not respond in the same way. This heterogeneity indicates that population shocks lead to an increase in urban relative to rural populations. Overall, the evidence suggests that exogenous migration shocks can foster urbanization in the medium run.

Armed Conflict --- Black Population --- Business Cycles and Stabilization Policies --- Common Carriers Industry --- Conflict and Development --- Construction Industry --- Economic Geography --- Employment and Unemployment --- Food and Beverage Industry --- General Manufacturing --- Industry --- Labor Mobility --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Migration --- Natural Experiment --- Plastics and Rubber Industry --- Pulp and Paper Industry --- Skills Development and Labor Force Training --- Textiles, Apparel and Leather Industry --- Urbanization

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The relationship between the length of paid maternity leave and the proportion of female workers in the private sector is explored using firm-level survey data for 66 mostly developing countries. The paper finds a large, positive, and statistically significant relationship between the two. According to the most conservative estimate, an increase of one week of paid maternity leave is associated with a 2.6 percentage points increase in the share of workers in a typical firm that are female. As expected, the stated relationship is much larger when the government pays for maternity leave versus the employer. The results are robust to several controls for firm and country characteristics and other possible heterogeneities in the maternity leave and female workers relationship.

Business Cycles and Stabilization Policies --- Common Carriers Industry --- Construction Industry --- Developing Countries --- Female Employment --- Firms --- Food and Beverage Industry --- Gender --- Gender and Development --- General Manufacturing --- Labor Management and Relations --- Labor Markets --- Maternity Leave --- Plastics and Rubber Industry --- Pulp and Paper Industry --- Rural Development --- Rural Labor Markets --- Social Protections and Labor --- Textiles Apparel and Leather Industry

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Over the past decades, East Asia and Pacific's productivity has been gradually catching up with the frontier (the United States), with China leading the pack. Productivity growth has been driven by sustained within-sector productivity growth. Reallocation of labor to sectors with higher productivity, such as industry and services, also contributed to productivity improvements. Nevertheless, resource misallocation remains. Firm-level evidence from four East Asia and Pacific countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam) suggests that resource misallocation across firms within a sector is large, albeit declining over time. Private domestic firms and firms with higher productivity face larger distortions.

Agriculture --- Business cycles and stabilization policies --- Common carriers industry --- Construction industry --- Distortions --- Food and beverage industry --- Food security --- General manufacturing --- Industry --- Inequality --- International economics and trade --- International trade and trade rules --- Labor markets --- Macroeconomics and economic growth --- Plastics and rubber industry --- Poverty --- Poverty reduction --- Productivity --- Pulp and paper industry --- Resource misallocation --- Social protections and labor --- Textiles apparel and leather industry

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This paper estimates the impact of market access liberalization in high-income countries on sub-Saharan African exports. The methodology exploits the large reduction in trade barriers that was induced by three unilateral trade liberalization initiatives: (1) the dismantling of the Multi-Fiber Arrangement, (2) the African Growth and Opportunity Act in the United States, and (3) the extension of EU trade preferences for developed countries through its Everything-but-Arms program and the General System of Preferences. Using detailed product-level information at the 6-digit level of the Harmonized System and a triple-difference empirical specification, the usual endogeneity-of-policy critique is flexibly controlled for. The results indicate strongly positive export effects, which are especially large for textile, apparel, and leather products, and tend to be realized fully within 5 years. Each percentage point reduction in import tariffs raises exports to the EU by 0.73 percent and to the United States by 0.30 percent; effects are two to three times as large for textiles. The presence of strong Chinese imports has ambiguous effects on countries' ability to take advantage of trade liberalization as the impact on the export effects to the EU and the United States show an opposite sign.

Exports --- General System of Preferences --- Global Value Chain --- Industry --- International Economics and Trade --- International Trade and Trade Rules --- Multi-Fiber Arrangement --- Preferential Trade --- Rules of Origin --- Textiles and Apparel --- Textiles, Apparel and Leather Industry --- Trade Agreements --- Trade Liberalization --- Trade Policy --- Triple-Difference