Formalizing firms can potentially increase the tax base, expand safety and social protections for workers, create good jobs, and promote firm growth. However, the costs and processes of formality may be too challenging for some firms to bear. Thus, informal firms may not be able to survive the transition to formality, and attempts to expand formality through more intensive enforcement may be harmful and counterproductive to job creation and growth. This paper investigates the potential for currently informal firms to formalize in Egypt. The paper compares the characteristics of formal and informal micro and small nonagricultural firms and identifies the extent of similarities and potential for formalization. The analysis finds that, beyond firm size and whether the firm operates in a fixed establishment, the basic and easily observable characteristics of firms are not closely linked to formality. Firm age, productivity, and owner characteristics, such as education, are strongly predictive of formality. The predicted probability of being formal is greater than 50% for only about 26% of informal firms, suggesting most firms are not good candidates for formalization. The paper develops profiles (groups and clusters) of similar firms to identify those with a higher potential for formalization.

Agrifood sector mechanization service providers (MSP) and mechanization equipment retailers (MER) have increasingly become the providers of mechanical technologies for smallholders in developing countries, including Myanmar. Evidence remains scarce on the effects of COVID-19 on these MSPs and MERs. This study provides insights into the effects of COVID-19 restrictions on MSPs and MERs in Myanmar, using unbalanced panel data from five rounds of phone surveys. Direct responses to COVID-19 involving movement restrictions, market disruptions, and growing financial challenges had significant negative effects on revenue prospects, service delivery, and sales of machines and equipment. Negative revenue prospects during a particular period can further hurt revenue prospects in subsequent periods. This is consistent with the hypotheses that MSPs who had incurred high sunk costs in machines can engage in more desperate and, thus, potentially suboptimal business practices to recover the sunk cost. Overall, policies to minimize movement restrictions and various financial struggles and mitigate any pessimism at the beginning of the production season are all important to make sure MSPs and MERs continue to function effectively under COVID-19.

The COVID-19 outbreak has affected everyday lives worldwide. As governments started to implement confinement and business closure measures, the economic impact was felt by entire societies immediately. The urgency of such a theme has led researchers to study the phenomenon. Accordingly, the purpose of this research is to provide the state of the art on relevant dimensions and hot topics of research to understand the economic impacts of COVID-19. In this survey, we conduct a text mining analysis of 301 articles published during 2020 which analyzed such economic impacts. By defining a set of relevant dimensions grounded on existing literature, we were able to extract a set of coherent topics that aggregate the collected articles, characterized by the predominance of a few sets of dimensions. We found that the impact on "financial markets" was widely studied, especially in relation to Asia. Next, we found a more diverse range of themes analyzed in Europe, from "government measures" to "macroeconomic variables." We also discovered that America has not received the same degree of attention, and "institutions," "Africa," or "other pandemics" were studied less. We anticipate that future research will proliferate focusing on several themes, from environmental issues to the effectiveness of government measures.

This paper evaluates whether different labor market policy interventions taken in response to the COVID-19 pandemic have been effective in reducing its adverse impacts. We construct a database covering 165 countries and 39 labor market interventions grouped into four pillars: stimulating the economy and jobs (pillar 1); supporting enterprises, employment, and incomes (pillar 2); protecting workers (pillar 3); and social dialogue (pillar 4). The results revealed that measures taken under pillars 1, 2, and 3 have reduced the impacts of the pandemic on economic growth; measures under pillar 4 were significantly associated with reducing its impacts on employment and those under pillar 2 with reducing its impacts on working hours.

Financial inclusion and education contribute to a country's development and economic growth. However, despite the significant efforts being made to increase access to financial products for women, a high percentage still do not have access to and effective use of formal financial services in the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. This study analyzes financial inclusion (based on gender equality) in the countries studied using a pooled-panel ordinary least squares econometric technique. Furthermore, the impact of interactions between the level of study, use of technology, academic degree during the Covid-19 restrictions, number of credit borrowers, and number of borrowers with the interaction of the restrictions during the health emergency was evaluated employing the Gini coefficient and human development index (HDI). This study confirms that Latin America and the Caribbean countries can increase financial inclusion by changing their social aspects based on gender equality to ease using technology and access to credit. The results of this study are helpful for policy-makers in formulating and implementing policies that lead to action plans that reverse an exclusionary financial system, promote financial education, and empower women.

Information provision for social welfare via cheap technological media is now a widely available tool used by policymakers. Often, however, an ample supply of information does not translate into high consumption of information due to various frictions in demand, possibly stemming from the pecuniary and non-pecuniary cost of engagement, along with institutional factors. We test this hypothesis in the Indian context using a unique data set comprising 2 million call records of enrolled users of ARMMAN, a Mumbai-based nongovernmental organization that sends timely informational calls to mobile phones of less-privileged pregnant women. The strict lockdown induced by COVID-19 in India was an unexpected shock on engagement with m-Health technology, in terms of both reductions in market wages and increased time availability at home. Using a difference-in-differences design on unique calls tracked at the user-time level with fine-grained time-stamps on calls, we find that during the lockdown period, the call durations increased by 1.53 percentage points. However, technology engagement behavior exhibited demographic heterogeneity increasing relatively after the lockdown for women who had to borrow the phones vis-à-vis phone owners, for those enrolled in direct outreach programs vis-à-vis self-registered women, and for those who belonged to the low-income group vis-à-vis high-income group. These findings are robust with coarsened exact matching and with a placebo test for a 2017-2018 sample. Our results have policy implications around demand-side frictions for technology engagement in developing economies and maternal health.

This symposium issue speaks to the topic of poverty dynamics and vulnerability during an unusual, unexpected and damaging global pandemic. We provide here an introduction and overview to the symposium.

India has been hard-hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. The virus has exacted a heavy toll in terms of lives lost and deteriorating health outcomes. The economic consequences of the pandemic have been similarly grim. In this paper we attempt an initial, interim, assessment of the impacts of the crisis on poverty. We review the growing literature that considers emerging poverty impacts, noting that there remain significant knowledge gaps due to limited evidence on current welfare outcomes. We analyze pre-Covid survey data to examine the incidence of chronic poverty and downward mobility during a period of rapid economic growth and declining poverty. A profile of poverty during such a period might offer a plausible, partial, window on population groups currently at risk. We suggest that, notwithstanding the severe initial impacts of the crisis on poverty, there are grounds for expecting further consequences going forward. As the virus has spread out of the relatively affluent cities, and as economic stagnation persists, rural areas, with historically higher rates of chronic poverty and vulnerability, may see particularly sharp increases in poverty. While recent vaccination developments offer some grounds for optimism, there remains an urgent need to identify, implement and amplify effective policy alleviation measures.

We aim at identifying vulnerable groups that face a higher risk of falling into poverty due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Applying a synthetic panel data approach, our analysis of poverty and vulnerability transitions during the pre-COVID period shows not only a high rate of poverty persistence in Ethiopia but also a high probability of moving from vulnerable nonpoor status to poor status. Given the observed persistence of poverty and greater risk of downward mobility, even in the pre-COVID period, it is highly likely that poverty persistence and downward mobility will be aggravated during the current pandemic. A detailed poverty profiling exercise shows that households where the household head is less educated, engaged in the service sector, self-employed, and a domestic worker are population segments with a high rate of downward mobility. As the emerging evidence on the socioeconomic impact of COVID shows, these segments of the population are also the ones relatively more affected by the pandemic. Overall, the pandemic is likely to result in a serious setback to the progress made in poverty reduction in Ethiopia. Poverty reduction policies should thus target not only the existing poor but also the vulnerable nonpoor.

This study aims at providing new insights into poverty, vulnerability, and their correlates in Mozambique, applying synthetic panels techniques and expanding on earlier analyses. Our results suggest that there is a high degree of poverty immobility, especially in rural areas in the northern and central regions and for low-educated people. Even nonpoor households are at a high risk to vulnerability, and this risk does not differ much for households in urban/rural areas or in different regions or with different education levels. We also observe that a large portion of the population remains in or out of poverty over the entire year, with a higher percentage of individuals moving into poverty between the dry and the rainy seasons and a nonnegligible proportion of vulnerable people not managing to revert to nonpoverty in the subsequent dry season. Overall, these findings are highly relevant for designing anti-poverty policies and strategies, as they provide information on intra-year shocks and on some of the characteristics related to upward and downward mobility over longer time spans, also with regard to the recent Covid-19 and other recent shocks suffered by the country.

The main objective of this study is to identify the socioeconomic, meteorological, and geographical factors associated with the severity of COVID-19 pandemic in India. The severity is measured by the cumulative severity ratio (CSR)-the ratio of the cumulative COVID-related deaths to the deaths in a pre-pandemic year-its first difference and COVID infection cases. We have found significant interstate heterogeneity in the pandemic development and have contrasted the trends of the COVID-19 severities between Maharashtra, which had the largest number of COVID deaths and cases, and the other states. Drawing upon random-effects models and Tobit models for the weekly and monthly panel data sets of 32 states/union territories, we have found that the factors associated with the COVID severity include income, gender, multi-morbidity, urbanization, lockdown and unlock phases, weather including temperature and rainfall, and the retail price of wheat. Brief observations from a policy perspective are made toward the end.

We use methods developed by the Commitment to Equity Institute to assess the effects of government taxation, social spending and indirect subsidies on poverty and inequality in Ghana. We also simulate several policy reforms to assess their distributional consequences. Results show that, although the country has some very progressive taxes and well-targeted expenditures, the extent of fiscal redistribution is small, but about what one would expect given Ghana's income level and relatively low initial inequality. Results for poverty reduction are less encouraging: were it not for the in-kind benefits from health and education spending, the overall effect of government spending and taxation would actually increase poverty in Ghana. Eliminating energy subsidies and at the same time reallocating part of the savings to well-targeted transfer programs could lower the fiscal deficit while reducing inequality and protecting the poor.