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This paper investigates the outstanding economic growth experience of Bangladesh. It shows that the country’s improvements in structural correlates of growth from 1990 to 2004 are in the global top 5 percent for any 15-year period since 1970. They were driven by infrastructure enhancements, more openness to trade, and increasing foreign direct investment. Additionally, this period coincided with significant financial reforms after the banking crisis of the late 1980s and increased political stability. A further increase in growth after 2005 was not correlated with new growth impulses from structural improvements. Instead, the benefits from previous achievements and a stable macroeconomic and institutional environment were “good enough” to prevent the mean reversion of growth that comparable fast-growing economies usually experience.

This paper investigates whether electricity consumption is a useful indicator for tracking economic fluctuations in Bangladesh. It presents monthly data on national electricity consumption since 1993 and daily consumption data since February 2010 for the country’s eight divisions. National electricity consumption is strongly correlated with other high-frequency indicators of economic activity, and it has declined during natural disasters and the COVID-19 lockdowns. The paper estimates an electricity consumption model that explains over 90 percent of the variation in daily consumption based on the trend, seasonality, within-week variation, holidays, Ramadan, and temperature. Deviations from the model prediction can act as in indicator of economic fluctuations. For example, during the first COVID-19 lockdown in April 2020, electricity consumption in Dhaka fell over 40 percent compared with normal and remained below the normal level until early 2021. The later lockdowns, in contrast, had only small additional impacts, in line with less stringent containment measures and more effective adaptation.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, the intense debate about secular stagnation will become even more important. Empirical estimates of equilibrium real interest rates are so far mostly limited to advanced economies, since no statistical procedure suitable for a large set of countries is available. This is surprising, as equilibrium rates have strong policy implications in emerging markets and developing economies as well; current estimates of the global equilibrium rate rely on only a few countries; and estimates for a more diverse set of countries can improve understanding of the drivers. This paper proposes a model and estimation strategy that decompose ex ante real interest rates into a permanent and transitory component even with short samples and high volatility. This is done with an unobserved component local level stochastic volatility model, which is used to estimate equilibrium rates for 50 countries with Bayesian methods. Equilibrium rates were lower in emerging markets and developing economies than in advanced economies in the 1980s, similar in the 1990s, and have been higher since 2000. In line with economic integration and rising global capital markets, synchronization has been rising over time and is higher among advanced economies. Equilibrium rates of countries with stronger trade linkages and similar demographic and economic trends are more synchronized.

This paper estimates the impact of a differential relaxation of COVID-19 containment policies on aggregate economic activity in India. Following a uniform national lockdown, the Government of India classified all districts into three zones with varying containment measures in May 2020. Using a difference-in-differences approach, the paper estimates the impact of these restrictions on nighttime light intensity, a standard high-frequency proxy for economic activity. To conduct this analysis, pandemic-era, district-level data from a range of novel sources are combined -- monthly nighttime lights from global satellites; Facebook’s mobility data from individual smartphone locations; and high-frequency, household-level survey data on income and consumption, supplemented with data from the Indian Census and the Reserve Bank of India. The analysis finds that nighttime light intensity in May was 12.4 percent lower for districts with the most severe restrictions and 1.7 percent lower for districts with intermediate restrictions, compared with districts with the least restrictions. The differences were largest in May, when the different policies were in place, and slowly tapered in June and July. Restricted mobility and lower household income are plausible channels for these results. Stricter containment measures had larger impacts in districts with greater population density of older residents, as well as more services employment and bank credit.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted economic activity in India. Adjusting policies to contain trans- mission while mitigating the economic impact requires an assessment of the economic situation in near real-time and at high spatial granularity. This paper shows that daily electricity consumption and monthly nighttime light intensity can proxy for economic activity in India. Energy consumption is compared with the predictions of a consumption model that explains 90 percent of the variation in normal times. Energy consumption declined strongly after a national lockdown was implemented on March 25, 2020 and remained a quarter below normal levels throughout April. It recovered somewhat subsequently, but electricity consumption was on average still 13.5 percent lower than normal in May. Not all states and union territories have been affected equally. While electricity consumption halved in some, others were not affected at all. Part of the heterogeneity is explained by the prevalence of manufacturing and return migration. At the district level, higher COVID-19 infection rates were associated with larger declines in nighttime light intensity in April. Together, daily electricity consumption and nighttime light intensity allow monitoring economic activity in near real-time and high spatial granularity.

This paper presents a new dataset of comparable employment indicators for South Asian countries, constructed from more than 60 primary data sources from 2001 to 2017. The main contribution of the paper is to curate the information provided by individual respondents to censuses and surveys, in a way that is consistent across countries and over time. The usefulness of the dataset is illustrated by conducting a rigorous assessment of employment characteristics, of changes in employment over time, and of the short- and long-run relationship between economic growth and employment growth in South Asia. The exercise shows that agriculture still employs the majority of the working-age population across the region and, except in Sri Lanka, more than half of the employment is self-employment or unpaid family work. The paper also shows that employment rates are generally decreasing in South Asia, and that in some countries female employment rates are falling rapidly. Seasonal growth patterns are shown to affect the composition of employment, while non-seasonal changes in short-run growth affect the overall level of employment. The paper estimates that, in the long run, one percentage point growth of gross domestic product has led on average to a 0.34 percent increase in employment.

This paper analyzes whether fiscal policy in South Asia amplifies or smooths business cycle fluctuations. The paper estimates several econometric models to explore the cyclicality of government spending and tax buoyancy. The findings show that fiscal policy is procyclical in most countries. In South Asia, tax revenue increases less than one to one with gross domestic product, but public spending increases more than proportionally. While changes in tax revenue have no significant impact on economic activity, the government spending multiplier is positive and significant: an additional 1 USD of spending leads to an immediate increase in gross domestic product of 0.3 USD and a cumulative increase of 0.6 USD. The impact of public spending on economic activity is entirely due to capital expenditure, which is also more procyclical. Procyclical public spending and a positive expenditure multiplier imply that fiscal policy in South Asia amplifies boom-and-bust cycles.

This letter examines the determinants of occupational autonomy and education-skill matches of immigrant workers in Germany. Their jobs are characterized by much lower autonomy than those of comparable natives and the immigrant penalty decreases only minimally over time. In contrast to wages, the difference between immigrants from advanced and non-advanced countries is small. But immigrants from advanced countries are much more likely to have a job matching their qualification. The probability of a match does not increase over time for highly educated immigrants, but does for others. Highly educated immigrant women have an additional disadvantage. In some industries low autonomy and skill downgrading of immigrant workers are particularly common.

Simon Stevin's (1548–1620) treatises had an influence on the construction of settlements in Southeast Asia as well as on the settlement of Malacca. In the treatise ‘Ideal Plan for a City’, published in 1649, Stevin developed a city design in which he was influenced by ideas of an ideal town according to the principles of the Italian Renaissance (fourteenth century until the sixteenth century). This treatise had an influence on the development of settlements in Southeast Asia. The settlement of Malacca was influenced, apart from the Dutch, by Portuguese design and architecture. The influence of Simon Stevin's treatise was also noticable on the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (United East Indies Company – VOC) settlement of Jayakarta (Batavia). VOC architecture and town planning in general was influenced by the ideas of Simon Stevin. The findings are that the three requirements, defence, agriculture and location, are met as mentioned by Stevin in ‘Ideal Plan for a City’. The other requirements of design (a...