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For centuries states have engaged in collecting data to serve various interests. In modern times, a data gap has emerged between developing and developed economies, with the latter having more advanced data systems. The authors explore the effects of data transparency on longrun growth for a sample of mostly developing economies. Data transparency is defined as the timely production of credible statistics as measured by the Statistical Capacity Index. The paper finds that data transparency has a positive effect on real gross domestic product per capita, implying a statistically significant impact on transitional growth to a higher potential level of gross domestic product per capita. The estimates indicate an elasticity of the magnitude of 0.03 percent per year, which is much larger than the elasticity of trade openness and schooling in the estimation sample. The empirics employ a variety of econometric estimators, including dynamic panel and cross-sectional instrumental variables estimators, with the latter approach yielding a higher estimated elasticity. The findings are robust to the inclusion of several factors in addition to political institutions and exogenous commodity-price and external debt-financing shocks.

This paper investigates the empirical relationship between citizens' perceptions of economic and political conditions and the incidence of nonviolent uprisings. Perceptions are measured by aggregating individual-level data from regional barometer surveys. The main results show that negative perceptions of political conditions -- proxied by the share of the population that is generally dissatisfied with the way democracy works -- have a significant positive effect on the number of protests and strikes. Negative perceptions of economic conditions do not seem to be significantly related to the latter. This generally holds across a large sample of countries and is particularly the case for Western and Central European countries as well as high-income countries. In developing economies, however, social protests appear to be driven by dissatisfaction with economic and political conditions. The heterogeneous effects of perceptions on uprisings across geography and income groups, however, are not robust and susceptible to changes in estimators and model specification. In particular, the international contagion of protests eliminates this international heterogeneity, implying that the incidence of uprisings in nearby countries tends to generate protests at home through its effect on perceptions related to political conditions in high-income countries. Overall, the effect of perceptions about political conditions, along with protest contagion, is robust to the inclusion of numerous control variables that capture actual economic conditions and the quality of governance across countries. The results are also robust to the use of seemingly valid instrumental variables, alternative count-data estimators, and sample composition.

The quality of the public procurement system of an economy can have far-reaching effects on the private sector. This paper empirically explores several of these effects using two rich data sets. An overall indicator of public procurement quality is created from the World Bank’s Benchmarking Public Procurement project that is then combined with firm-level data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys. The analysis includes more than 59,000 firms spanning more than 109 economies. The paper finds that firms in economies with good public procurement systems are more likely to participate in public procurement, face lower losses from shipping to domestic markets, and experience lower incidence of bribery than economies with poor public procurement systems. Similarly, better public procurement systems are positively correlated with more engagement in innovation, research and development, international certification, foreign technology adoption, and online connectivity.

Public procurement regulation is an important instrument for using public resources efficiently and ensuring quality services to citizens. On average, the public procurement sector accounts for 14.5 percent of the gross domestic product globally. Using new data, this study documents public procurement regulation and related processes in 142 economies. Scores for three public procurement areas are constructed and amalgamated into an overall quality of public procurement index. The index is then related to a measure of road quality across countries. The results indicate that improvement in the public procurement system improves road quality, especially in non-Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries.