The World Bank Open Knowledge Repository
The World Bank Open Knowledge Repository (OKR) is The World Bank’s official open access repository for its research outputs and knowledge products.
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Search tip: Use quotation marks around exact phrases Total publications: 40,697
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Publication Untying the Knot: Divorce Legalization and the Decline of Marriage(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2026-09-30) Choi, Sekyu; Joubert, ClementThis study investigates the impact of divorce legalization on marriage decisions and intra-household specialization using Chile’s 2004 reform as a case study. Opponents feared that introducing divorce would weaken the commitment value of marriage. Instead, the study documents a reversal of sharply declining trends in marriage rates, marital fertility, and the choice of the community property marriage regime in the 15 years following the law. These effects were most pronounced among highly educated women. The study hypothesizes that the introduction of legal divorce with equal division of marital assets allowed husbands to insure homemakers against the economic risks of informal marital separation, thereby incentivizing specialization and fertility. In support of this mechanism, the study shows that the law caused a large reduction in the labor supply of young women married before the law under community property compared to those married under asset separation, who were not affected by equal asset division. Furthermore, the findings show that the concentration of these effects among the highly educated is driven by their higher levels of household assets, as predicted by simulations from a limited-commitment, collective model of marital investment.Publication What Happens When Women Suddenly Stop Receiving Cash Transfers?(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2026-09-29) Iqbal, Nasir; Jalal, Amen; Mahmud, Mahreen; Vyborny, KateFemale-targeted cash transfers are widely used as a policy tool to enhance women’s empowerment. However, little is known about what happens when payments stop — whether due to budget cuts, program changes, or recipient graduation. This paper studies how women are affected by unanticipated program exit, and whether they experience backlash when they stop bringing cash home. Using a regression discontinuity-in-differences design around a revised eligibility threshold, the study followed 2,333 women exiting Pakistan’s largest cash transfer program, surveying them before program exit and one year after it. Drawing on comprehensive measures of empowerment, intimate partner violence, and well-being, the paper finds no evidence of negative impacts a year after exit. These results suggest that the gains experienced by women during the program are not undone by adverse reactions upon exit.Publication The China Syndrome: A Misdiagnosis?(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2026-09-29) Barattieri, Alessandro; Mattoo, AadityaChina’s growing dominance in manufacturing exports is attracting widespread attention. However, existing explanations of China’s export exceptionalism and its consequences for developing countries suffer from three shortcomings. First, attributing China’s large and increasing share in manufacturing exports primarily to its industrial policy obscures more fundamental factors: the scale of its economy, the diversity of its provincial endowments, and the pace of its automation. Second, focusing on the low-skilled export dimension of China’s economic expansion overlooks its positive impact on growth and its heterogeneous effects on structural transformation in developing countries. Finally, blaming foreign industrial policies distracts attention from the often more damaging trade and investment restrictions imposed by developing countries themselves, many of which could be reformed unilaterally.Publication “Many Chinas”: Provincial Foundations of Chinese Export Performance(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2026-09-28) Barattieri, Alessandro; Chen, Jessica; Li, Bingjing; Mattoo, AadityaChina’s export performance is characterized by two striking features: a steady rise in export sophistication and the continued prominence of less sophisticated products. In this paper we propose the “Many Chinas” hypothesis, that China’s provinces differ in their comparative advantage, and in how this comparative advantage has evolved over time. Using detailed Chinese customs export data from 1995 to 2023, we investigate the provincial underpinnings of China’s export performance. Three main findings emerge. First, export similarity between Chinese provinces and the advanced economies increased over time, initially more rapidly in the Eastern provinces. Second, despite this increased export similarity with the advanced countries, there remained significant heterogeneity across provinces in 2023. In their export structure, provinces such as Shanghai and Jiangsu resemble most closely the Republic of Korea while Guangdong and Shanxi resemble Viet Nam and the Philippines, respectively. Third, this paper identifies a novel pattern: during the first decade after China’s WTO accession in 2001, the export sophistication of Eastern provinces increased much faster than that of other provinces, but after about 2010, there has been remarkable convergence in sophistication across all provinces.Publication Can the Flying Geese Fly Again? Automation and the Pattern of Industrialization(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2026-09-28) Artuc, Erhan; Barattieri, Alessandro; Noukwe, Isambert Leunga; Mattoo, AadityaThree key developments, protectionism, aging, and automation, are affecting the global pattern of industrial production and trade. While these trends affect many countries, they are especially consequential for China, which currently dominates global manufacturing. Using a multi-country model fitted with global trade and robotization data, this paper shows that automation can mitigate the adverse effects of protection and aging on competitiveness, particularly in sectors with a high share of automatable tasks. The impact of a 10 percent decline in labor force in China would be offset by doubling of robot productivity in vehicles, but robot productivity would need to more than triple in computers.
