Bilge Erten

Intimate partner violence remains one of the most serious threats to women's safety worldwide, yet existing evidence on the effectiveness of large-scale institutional protection systems is limited and mixed. This paper evaluates the impact of Violence Prevention and Monitoring Centers on intimate partner violence (IPV) against women in Türkiye. Exploiting the staggered rollout of centers across provinces, we find that the opening of a center reduces female homicides, particularly those perpetrated by intimate partners, by approximately 20 percent. Complementary survey evidence shows that the opening of a center also reduces women's self-reported exposure to physical IPV by 20 percent, with larger effects among younger and less-educated women. Exploring potential mechanisms, we find that centers primarily reduce violence by lowering barriers to help-seeking and improving coordination across police, legal, and social services: following the opening of a center, women become more likely to seek support from women's organizations and social services, while direct applications to prosecutors decline. We find no evidence of effects on gender attitudes, labor market outcomes, relationship status, marriage market outcomes, or mental health, suggesting violence reductions operate through improved access to protection rather than changes in norms or economic independence. The estimated effects are stronger in provinces with more gender-progressive norms and stronger institutional capacity, highlighting the importance of complementary social and institutional environments.

Substance use is a well-established driver of intimate partner violence (IPV), with drug-related incidents posing persistent challenges for both public health and criminal justice systems. We examine how expanding access to substance use treatment (SUT) services affects IPV in the United States by leveraging variation in the opening and closing of treatment facilities at the county level. Using administrative data on IPV incidents from the National Incident-Based Reporting System at the agency level from 1998 to 2019 combined with county-level records on treatment facility information, we implement a continuous difference-in-differences research design. Our results show that adding three SUT facilities—the average annual increase per county over the sample period—reduces drug-involved IPV by about 1.5–1.7 percent. We find no evidence of significant effects on alcohol-related or non-substance-related IPV. Staggered event-study analyses confirm parallel outcome trends, across treated and non-treated counties, prior to net facility openings and lend support to a causal interpretation of the estimates. Related evidence from SUT admissions drawn from the Treatment Episode Data Set (TEDS) shows that new centers significantly raise treatment entry, particularly among men, consistent with reduced perpetration driving the observed decline in IPV exposure. Our findings highlight the role of health services infrastructure in shaping violence-related outcomes and underscore the broader public safety benefits of investment in treatment access.

Abstract from the December 2025 working-paper version.

We present the first causal evidence that large-scale provision of public mental health services improves educational outcomes for children. We exploit the roll-out of Juvenile Psychosocial Care Centers (CAPS), which were introduced as a community-based substitute for inpatient mental healthcare, across municipalities in Brazil. Using unique nationwide data linking multiple large administrative datasets, we find that these centers increased the provision of mental health services for children through public outpatient care. Following a juvenile CAPS opening, children in treated municipalities experienced an increase in their probability of remaining enrolled in school by up to 1.6 percentage points. These effects are concentrated among children from relatively more disadvantaged backgrounds, with mothers who have not completed high school and who live in lower-income municipalities. The increases in enrollment are more pronounced for boys, who are twice as likely to receive treatment and at younger ages due to the early onset of the mental conditions they typically experience. Our findings indicate that providing accessible mental health services through community-based centers can significantly enhance educational outcomes for children.

Abstract from the September 2026 working-paper version.

China’s integration into the global market is widely viewed as central to its economic development, yet evidence on its demographic effects remains limited. We leverage a novel dataset tracking industry-specific foreign direct investment (FDI) regulation in China from 1997–2011 to examine whether FDI liberalization shifts marriage and fertility. Using a shift-share policy shock at the county level linked to census data, we find that counties more exposed to liberalization experience substantial relative declines in marriage and birth rates, set against already low fertility, and a disproportionate decline in male versus female births. These effects are concentrated in rural areas and driven by symmetric transitions of men and women out of agriculture into manufacturing and services. We find no evidence that differential labor market gains for women or rising education explain the fertility decline. The results show that broad, gender-neutral globalization shocks can alter demographic patterns even in low-fertility contexts.

The CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 signaled a renewed political commitment to industrial policy in the United States, after decades of bipartisan skepticism toward state-led economic intervention. This paper places the recent revival in historical perspective by assembling a comprehensive dataset on federal US industrial policy spanning 1962 to 2024. We integrate on-budget spending, off-budget tax expenditures, and federal financial instruments to measure industrial policy consistently across sectors and time. Over time, US industrial policy shifted from visible direct subsidies toward less visible tax expenditures and indirect tools, which received less political attention despite being of comparable economic size. We also document the importance of federal credit programs, as well as high-level changes in trade protection. We compare US expenditures to those of other countries; when measured comprehensively, US expenditures as a share of GDP remain below those of several European economies and likely below those of China. Recent US legislative actions represent a renewed commitment to industrial policy rather than a sharp break with the past.

We study the impact of women’s political representation on the well-being of their female constituents, specifically in the domain of health. Increasing women’s political representation leads to greater public provision of reproductive health care services in rural areas. Consequently, rural women can exercise greater control over their reproductive choices through the adoption of modern contraception and increased birth spacing. However, these positive impacts are accompanied by an increase in intimate partner violence against women. The increase in spousal abuse is particularly pronounced among women whose husbands prefer to have additional sons, suggesting that the wife’s greater contraceptive use triggers marital conflict.

Abstract from the May 2025 working-paper version.

Mental health conditions pose serious challenges to children’s ability to learn and regulate their emotions, directly impacting their human capital development, with depressive disorders being among the most common. We leverage a change in international trade policy to examine how early childhood economic shocks influence adolescent mental health, with a specific focus on the prevalence of depression among teenagers in China. The United States granted China permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) in 2002, which substantially increased access of Chinese producers to U.S. market. Exploiting variation in tariff uncertainty faced by Chinese regions pre-2002, we find that the affected regions experienced a relative increase in average income per worker and structural transformation after the policy change. Children born in more exposed regions experience a significant relative improvement in their mental health outcomes during adolescence. We elucidate several potential mechanisms, including parental income, early childhood investments, and at-home care provision. We further show that selective migration, parental absence, or fertility decline are unlikely to account for the changes we document. Our findings highlight the importance of potential mental health improvements stemming from early exposure to trade reforms that expand access to global markets.

The CHIPS and Science Act, enacted in August 2022, is a key element of the revival of U.S. industrial policy. We examine the short-term employment effects of the act. Drawing on quarterly industry-bycounty data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), we implement two countylevel difference-in-difference designs, the first comparing counties with pre-existing semiconductor facilities to other counties with high-tech industries and the second comparing counties with semiconductor fabrication facilities (which were targeted for the bulk of the CHIPS funding) to counties with non-fabrication semiconductor facilities. Using both approaches, we find robust, positive employment impacts in affected counties. The effects began at the time of the passage in the Senate of a precursor bill, in anticipation of the signing of the CHIPS Act. Our preferred estimates suggest an increase of 110 jobs per affected county in the first design and 180 jobs per affected county in the second design. We also find robust positive impacts on local construction employment. Evidence on total employment and GDP at the county level, as well as on employment in upstream input sectors, is mixed. Simple backof-the-envelope calculations (which come with caveats) suggest national direct employment effects of approximately 15,000-16,000 jobs in the core semiconductor sector and indirect effects of 28,000-35,000 jobs in related sectors.

In overturning Roe v. Wade and triggering laws in many states that ban or severely restrict abortion, the Supreme Court ’s landmark 2022 Dobbs decision dramatically altered the landscape of reproductive health in the U.S. Prior research has highlighted the far-reaching impact of abortion restrictions for women and families, which extend beyond their proximate effects on abortions, births, and fertility. We provide some of the first causal evidence on how abortion restrictions in the post-Dobbs era have impacted women ’s risk of exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV). IPV is the most common form of violence experienced by women, and changes in access to abortion may generate unintended effects on various inputs (economic resources, stress, intra-household bargaining) that could affect relationship dynamics and raise the risk of IPV. Leveraging information on IPV incidents reported to law enforcement from 2017 – 2023 combined with post-Dobbs changes in county-level travel distance to abortion facilities, analyses are based on a generalized difference-in-differences approach. We find that abortion restrictions – alternately measured by the increase in travel distance and by the presence of a near-total ban – significantly increased the rate of IPV for reproductive-age women in treated counties by about seven to 10 percent. These estimates imply at least 9000 additional incidents of IPV among women in the treated “trigger ban” states, which is predicted to add over $1.24 billion in social costs.

Substance abuse is a major risk factor for intimate partner violence (IPV). We investigate how a key supply-side intervention – the abuse-deterrent reformulation of a widely-diverted opioid, OxyContin – affected IPV. Our results indicate counties with greater baseline rates of prescription opioid usage experienced relatively larger declines in IPV after OxyContin’s reformulation. The reformulation reduced IPV only in states with smaller illicit drug markets, while states with larger illicit drug markets experienced increased heroin-involved IPV due to substitution towards illicit opioids. Our results underscore the importance of identifying populations at high risk of substitution to illicit opioids and moderating this risk with evidence-based policies.

The opioid crisis generates broader societal harms beyond direct health and economic effects, impacting non-users through adverse spillovers on children, families, and communities. We study the spillover effects of a supply-side policy aimed at reducing overprescription of opioids on women’s well-being by examining its effects on intimate partner violence (IPV) in the United States. Using administrative data on incidents reported to law enforcement, in conjunction with quasi-experimental variation in the adoption of stringent mandatory-access prescription drug monitoring programs, we find that these policies generate a downstream benefit for women by significantly reducing their overall exposure to IPV and IPV-involved injuries by 9 to 10%. The strongest effects are experienced by groups with higher rates of opioid consumption at baseline, including non-Hispanic Whites. Our findings also show a significant increase in heroin-involved IPV incidents, suggesting substitution into illicit drug consumption. However, since heroin-related IPV accounts for less than 1% of all incidents, its increase among highly opioid-dependent individuals does not offset the overall decline in total IPV incidents in affected states. Our results highlight the need to identify high-risk groups prone to switching to illicit opioids and to address this risk through evidence-based policies.

We investigate the impact of healthcare facility supply on infant mortality by exploiting a change in local governments in Turkey as a quasi-exogenous shock to local hospital supply. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find a significant decline in infant mortality in municipalities where an Islamic mayor was barely elected. Exploring potential channels, we document a significant increase in the number and size of hospitals and health clinics in treated municipalities. Moreover, children in these municipalities are more likely to be born in government facilities, receive treatment for cough and fever, benefit from a greater number of childhood vaccinations, and have more prenatal care visits before birth. Our findings highlight that investments in public healthcare facilities in disadvantaged areas can have substantial effects on the survival of infants.

We study the impact of trade-induced changes in labor market conditions on violence within the household. We exploit the local labor demand shocks generated by Cambodia’s WTO accession to assess how changes in the employment of women relative to men affected the risk of intimate partner violence. We document that men in districts facing larger tariff reductions experienced a significant decline in paid employment, whereas women in harder-hit districts increased their entry into the labor force. These changes in employment patterns triggered backlash effects by increasing intimate partner violence, without changes in marriage, fertility, psychological distress, or household consumption.

During the Arab Spring protests, Egyptian women demonstrated in streets in unprecedented numbers, challenging societal norms about women’s roles and rights. Using a triple difference approach and nationally representative DHS data, this study exploits regional variation in protest intensity and women’s participation in the protests from 2011 to 2014 to examine the changes in women’s risk of experiencing domestic violence. Results show that women experienced a significant decline in their probability of experiencing physical, sexual, and psychological violence from their intimate partners in regions more exposed to women’s political participation in Arab Spring protests. Exploring potential channels, the study finds a significant increase in women’s decisionmaking power in more affected regions, without significant changes in attitudes toward domestic violence or labor market outcomes. These effects underscore the role of increased visibility of women in public spaces in empowering women and reducing their experience of intimate partner violence.

Violence against women (VAW) is widely recognized as a pervasive, global problem that is associated with poor health and economic outcomes for women and children. Women are disproportionately exposed to physical, sexual, and psychological violence during volent conflicts and political upheavals. Similarly, research on disasters indicates a disproportionate impact of such events on women and girls, with an increase in physical and sexual VAW, specific deprivations, and child marriage. This special issue is focused on providing a feminist understanding of the economic drivers and impacts of conflict and disaster on VAW, both within and outside the home. The introduction provides an overview of the contributions and interventions in this special issue, highlighting the complex links between conflict or disaster with VAW. This collection of articles also points to the large gaps in terms of integrating feminist perspectives into the international architecture for post-conflict or post-disaster aid and reconstruction.

This editorial has no separate abstract. The opening overview is reproduced below.

Over the past three decades, the world has witnessed a remarkable surge in global economic integration, propelled by increased trade, higher cross-border investment flows, and greater international migration. A growing body of research documents that this ever-increasing interconnectivity has brought about important changes in developing economies, and many of these shifts also have gendered effects. Accordingly, this special issue aims to expand the body of evidence around the gender-specific impacts of globalization within the context of lower- and middleincome economies, presenting a diverse range of papers using di ff erent empirical and theoretical strategies.

This study explores the impact of the arrival of Syrian refugees in Turkey on access to health-care resources and subsequent changes in infectious disease rates among native children. Employing a distance-based instrument, it finds that native children living in regions that received large inflows of Syrian refugees experienced an increase in their risk of catching an infectious disease compared to children in less affected regions. In contrast, there is no evidence of significant changes in the incidences of noninfectious diseases such as diabetes, cancer, or anemia. The findings also reveal that the number of health-care professionals and hospital beds per capita declined in provinces that received large refugee inflows. This study also documents a decrease in native children’s probability of being fully vaccinated in provinces that received large refugee inflows. Although contact with potentially infected refugees may increase disease spread among natives, the migration-induced supply constraints in health-care access may also worsen health outcomes in host countries.

Abstract from the July 2021 working-paper version.

We examine the effects of government-mandated or self-imposed social distancing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic on the reporting of domestic violence to the police in the United States. Using a large dataset of daily domestic violence calls from 31 police departments for the January–September 2020 period (compared to 2019), we find that the early spike in police calls from the beginning of social distancing disappears around mid-April. This timing coincides with the beginning of the distribution of CARES Act stimulus payments. We observe that domestic violence calls for areas with higher concentration of Hispanics and noncitizens remain elevated even after this period. It is possible that these groups faced greater barriers in accessing the social welfare system. These results underscore the importance of improved access to social safety net programs in combating domestic violence and reconcile earlier findings in the literature of mixed evidence of the impact of COVID-19-induced social distancing on domestic violence.

Using a strict, age-specific lockdown order for adults aged 65 and older in Turkey, we examine the mental health consequences of an extended period of tight mobility restrictions on senior adults. Adopting a regression discontinuity design, we find that the curfew-induced decline in mobility substantially worsened mental health outcomes, including somatic and nonsomatic symptoms of mental distress (approximately 0.2 standard deviation). Exploring potential channels, we document an increase in social and physical isolation, with no evidence of robust changes in labor market outcomes or intrahousehold conflict for this subpopulation.

This article exploits the rollout of the 1997 Basic Education Program in Turkey, a reform that extended compulsory school attendance, to estimate the causal effects of education on women’s awareness of laws designed to reduce gender inequality and prevent domestic violence. The study implements a regressiondiscontinuity design and finds that the additional years of schooling improved women’s legal awareness. Women exposed to the education reform were more likely to have heard about the new laws and services through newspapers, journals, or books. However, despite these improvements, the study finds no evidence of a significant change in the risk of women experiencing domestic violence or their ability to quit abusive relationships.

We investigate the impact of female employment on intimate partner violence by exploiting the differential arrivals of Syrian refugees across Turkish provinces as an exogenous labor market shock. By employing a distance-based instrument, we find that refugee inflows caused a decline in female employment with no significant impact on male employment. This decline led to a reduction in intimate partner violence, without changes in partner characteristics, gender attitudes, co-residence patterns, or division of labor. Our results are consistent with instrumental theories of violence: a decline in female earning opportunities reduces the incentives of men to use violence for rent extraction.

This paper analyzes the effect of China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 on structural transformation at the local level, exploiting cross-sectional variation in tariff uncertainty faced by county economies pre-2001. Using a new panel of 1,800 Chinese counties from 1996 to 2013, we find that counties more exposed to the reduction in tariff uncertainty postaccession are characterized by increased exports and foreign direct investment, shrinking agricultural sectors, expanding secondary sectors, and higher total and per capita GDP. In addition, when labor substitutes from nonagricultural to agricultural production in counties exposed to positive trade shocks, agricultural output declines.

This paper synthesizes recent advances in the theoretical and empirical literature on capital controls. We start by observing that international capital flows have both benefits and costs, but some of these are not internalized by individual actors and thus constitute externalities. The theoretical literature has identified pecuniary externalities and aggregate demand externalities that respectively contribute to financial instability and recessions. These externalities provide a natural rationale for countercyclical capital controls that lean against boom and bust cycles in international capital flows. The empirical literature has developed several measures of capital controls to capture different aspects of capital account openness. We evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of different measures and provide an overview of the empirical findings on the effectiveness of capital controls in addressing the externalities identified by the theory literature, that is, in reducing financial fragility and enhancing macroeconomic stability. We also discuss strategies to deal with the endogeneity of capital controls in such statistical exercises. We conclude by providing an overview of the historical and current debates on the role of capital controls in macroeconomic management and their relationship to the academic literature.

The pandemic-driven global recession has already triggered a rapid decline in global commodity prices, particularly of energy products. This is taking place on top of a downward trend in commodity prices that was already underway. Yet it remains unclear how long this decline will last given the uncertainty about the global recession. In this comment, we provide an overview of evidence using 150 years of data on commodity prices and global output. Commodity prices have experienced trends as well as four longterm cycles (‘‘super cycles”) since the late 19th century, with the latter dependent on world demand. Although recent trends have been diverse, the two recent super cycles have been synchronized. The last one started at the turn of the century and had its peak in the early 2010s. Future trends would be determined by the weakness of global aggregate demand, changes in the global energy economy to mitigate climate change, and the weight of sub-Saharan Africa population on tropical commodities.

We revisit unconditional convergence within manufacturing with a focus on differences in technology intensity across industries. For Latin American and Sub- Saharan African economies, we observe tha t low-technology and medium-technology intensive industries experience a signific antly slower convergence in comparison to high-technology intensive ones. In contr ast, we find no evidence of a significant differential for low-technology industries ’ convergence in Asian economies, and if anything, we see that medium-technology intensive sectors experience a faster convergence than high-technology industries. In developed economies, we observe that while low-technology industries experience a slightly slower convergence, medium-technology industries converge at similar rates to high-technology industries. We also find that these differenc es emerge during the period of increased global integration, which exposed develo ping economies to increased competition both from advanced markets and fast indust rializers within the developing world. Finally, we show that differential convergence patterns are stronger after the peak of manufacturing employment share has been reached. We discuss the implications of these trends for the future of development policy making.

We estimate the causal effects of education on the intergenerational transmission of violence against children by exploiting an extension of compulsory schooling in Turkey. Using a regression-discontinuity design, we find that the reform increased maternal education by one year, with stronger effects for women raised in rural areas. The increase in education among rural women led to a reduction in the perpetration of child physical abuse but only by mothers who were physically abused by their own families during childhood. Exploring potential channels, we document that these women were also more likely to experience improved mental health outcomes.

Despite a large literature analyzing trade liberalization in developing countries, little evidence exists around its effects in sub-Saharan African economies characterized by high levels of baseline unemployment and weak manufacturing sectors. Using a local labor market approach, we investigate the causal effects of tariff reforms implemented in South Africa between 1994 and 2004 on labor market outcomes at the individual level. More specifically, we construct a district-level measure of exposure to tariff reductions equal to a weighted average of industry tariffs using baseline industry shares as weights, and estimate the effect of this shock on local economies. We find that workers in districts facing larger tariff reductions experience a significant decline in both formal and informal employment in the tradable sector, driven primarily by a decline in manufacturing employment, relative to workers in districts less exposed to these reductions. There is no evidence of any significant effect on wages for those who remain employed. However, displaced workers do not show any evidence of transitions into other sectors, or migration to less affected regions; rather, they are more likely to become discouraged workers or exit the labor force entirely, and show an increased probability of accessing government transfers.

We exploit an extension of compulsory schooling in Turkey to identify which population segments that otherwise would not have attended high school complied with the law and which type of schools they chose to attend. By adopting a regression discontinuity design, we find that the reform increased high school attendance for both boys and girls. The main compliers with the reform among boys were those who would have participated in paid employment prior to the change in law. Conversely, female compliers would have likely not been in education, employment, or training (NEET), or they could have been employed in unpaid work. Although regional poverty rates do not affect the compliance rates for boys or girls, we find that the reform had a positive impact on girls’ high school attendance only in more religiously conservative regions, and that the NEET status of girls in these regions declined. Finally, we find that the marginal students chose to attend vocational high schools, as opposed to academic high schools. We provide some suggestive evidence showing that the increase in vocational school attendance was not driven by an increase in the supply of these schools.

While a large literature examines the role of fiscal policy in reducing gender gaps in labor market outcomes, scant evidence exists for the role of monetary and exchange rate policies in doing so. Recent studies have shown that targeting an undervalued real exchange rate stimulates economic growth by expanding tradable sector output. We examine whether such growth reduces gender gaps in labor force participation by improving labor market opportunities for women. Using a comprehensive cross-country dataset from 1960 to 2015 for a maximum of 103 countries, we test whether there is a robust relationship between currency undervaluation and female labor force participation. We find that countries that maintain an undervalued real exchange rate realize an increase in female labor force participation, and a corresponding decline in the difference between male and female labor force participation rates. This finding is particularly pertinent for developing countries and is robust to various specification checks as well as different estimation techniques. We also provide suggestive evidence that the operative channel is an expansion of female employment in manufacturing and industrial sectors. Our findings have important policy implications, particularly for countries in earlier stages of their development. Our results indicate that the positive effect of undervaluation on female labor force participation is stronger in developing countries, implying that there may be opportunities for interventions to target a more undervalued real exchange rate in these countries. Hence, competitive exchange rate policies matter not only for raising long-term growth potential, but also for reducing longstanding gender disparities in labor force participation.

We exploit a change in the compulsory schooling law in Turkey to estimate the causal effects of education on the prevalence of domestic violence. By adopting a regression discontinuity design, we find that the reform increased women’s schooling by one year to one-anda-half years and improved their labor market outcomes, with particularly strong effects for women raised in rural areas. The increase in education among rural women led to an increase in self-reported psychological violence and financial control behavior, without changes in physical violence, partner characteristics, or women’s attitudes towards such violence.

The dramatic fluctuations in global food prices over the past two decades have generated significant concern about their destabilizing macroeconomic effects. While the pass-through effects of international food prices on domestic prices have been widely documented, these estimates have not taken into account reverse causality, omitted variable bias, or differences in sources of international food price fluctuations. We use sign restrictions to identify relevant demand and supply shocks that explain the volatility in global food prices. We quantify their dynamic effects on several components of food exporters ’ and food importers ’ domestic output, including household consumption, government consumption, investment, and net exports. Our findings reveal that identifying the sources of the shocks driving global food prices is crucial to evaluating their domestic effects. Expansions in global economic activity that increase global food prices stimulate the domestic output of both food-importing and food-exporting economies; however, disruptions in global food commodity markets that lead to rising real food prices have large contractionary effects for food importers due to deteriorating trade balances and falling household consumption. We also document that the adverse effects of unfavorable global food shocks on household consumption are greater for food-importing countries with relatively high shares of household food expenditures and large food trade deficits.

We analyze the effects of capital account regulations (CARs) across a large sample of emerging economies on a range of macroeconomic outcomes. We use composite indices of these regulations to capture their intensity in coverage and employ an instrumental variables strategy to overcome the endogeneity of regulations to outcomes. We estimate the effects of CARs on real exchange rate appreciation, foreign exchange pressure, crisis resilience, and post-crisis overheating using annual data from 1995 to 2011 for 51 emerging economies. We find that all CARs, except the financial sector-specific restrictions, reduce foreign exchange pressure and real exchange rate appreciation, contributing to greater macroeconomic stability. Our results further indicate that increasing the restrictiveness of CARs in the run-up to the crisis moderates the growth decline, thus enhancing crisis resilience, and that countries that used CARs experienced less overheating from capital inflow surges during post-crisis recovery. The latter two results imply that CARs are useful countercyclical policy instruments. Our estimates provide evidence in favor of models in which imperfect capital mobility can generate sustained effects on real exchange rates.

Despite the spread of budget initiatives for gender equality following the Beijing Declaration of 1995, resources allocated for eliminating gender inequalities remain inadequate. This paper proposes to create a Global Fund for Women through Innovative Finance (GFWIF) with the ability to raise funds through innovative sources of finance on a scale more appropriate to the estimated requirements of making reasonable progress toward gender equality (US$31– 107 billion per year in constant 2014 dollars). It builds on previous calls by feminist economists for the establishment of such funds through global forms of taxation. Since donors’ commitments only meet the lower bound, the GFWIF could scale up funding for gender equality interventions commensurate with country needs. Global resource mobilization through innovative mechanisms, including allocations of new Special Drawing Rights, currency transaction taxes, and carbon taxes, have the potential to provide the necessary financing at a much faster pace than is currently possible.

Decomposition of real commodity prices suggests four super cycles during 1865–2010 ranging between 30 and 40 years with amplitudes 20–40% higher or lower than the long-run trend. Non-oil price super-cycles follow world GDP, indicating they are essentially demand-determined; causality runs in the opposite direction for oil prices. The mean of each super-cycle of non-oil commodities is generally lower than for the previous cycle, supporting the Prebisch–Singer hypothesis. Tropical agriculture experienced the strongest and steepest long-term downward trend through the twentieth century, followed by non-tropical agriculture and metals, while real oil prices experienced a long-term upward trend, interrupted temporarily during the twentieth century.

This paper analyzes the robustness of emerging economies growth performance to a number of external demand shocks using a Bayesian vector autoregressive (BVAR) model with informative priors on the steady state. We show that more than fifty percent of the variation in real GDP growth of Latin American emerging economies is explained by external factors, while it is slightly less than fifty percent for emerging Asia and China. Conditional forecasts of different scenarios indicate that a deepening of the Eurozone recession would create a severe and persistent contraction for emerging economies, depending on the response of the U.S. growth to this shock. Finally, forecasts suggest that a sharp slowdown in China’s growth would have a significant negative impact on emerging economies’ growth, and that the Latin American countries would be more severely hit than the Asian ones.

The composition of exports of developing countries is increasingly dominated by manufactured goods. This has not changed the fact that their major trading partners continue to be the developed countries. In order to properly assess the distribution of gains from trade, there is a pressing need to analyze the movements in the terms of trade of developing countries with respect to the developed ones. A statistical analysis of the North–South terms of trade reveals that the terms of trade have turned against the South since the 1960s. However, the terms-of-trade deterioration is neither continuous nor evenly distributed over different country groupings. The existence of a structural break in the mid-to-late 1970s together with the greatest adverse terms-of-trade movements against the highly indebted and least developed countries attest the discontinuity and unevenness of this process.