Quy-Toan (Toan) Do is the Co-Director for the 2023 World Development Report and a Lead Economist in the Development Research Group. His research focuses on Fragility, Conflict and Violence with an emphasis on conflict, crime, and forced displacement. He is the lead author of the recent Policy Research Report Violence without Borders: the Internationalization of Crime and Conflict. He holds a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) and an MA from Ecole Polytechnique (France).
This Policy Research Report documents how permeable country borders have become in many different domains, and the troubling human and economic costs as the geographical spillovers of conflict and crime and political instability have intensified. The report suggests international institutions can play a critical role in stabilizing domestic fragility by moving settlement of disputes away from battlefields and toward global platforms.
In 2015 and 2016, migrant flows into the EU surged, with Greece and Italy the main entry points. Many of the migrants applied for international protection in Europe, becoming asylum seekers. This spike in EU asylum seekers, as well as the increasing numbers of those granted refugee status, brought a need for information on who they are—their sociodemographic characteristics; their education and work experience; their experience on the journey to Italy and Greece; and what it cost them not only financially but also physically and emotionally to get there.
Research output on a given country increases with the country’s population and wealth, yielding a strong correlation between per-capita research output and per capita GDP: a 10 percent increase in a country’s per-capita GDP translates into a 3.2 percent increase in the number of published economic research papers. These results raise questions about incentives to researchers in terms of their focus in publishing in academic journals, and highlight the role of development institutions such as the World Bank in ensuring that the poorest countries are not left out of the knowledge generating process.
You have clicked on a link to a page that is not part of the beta version of the new worldbank.org. Before you leave, we’d love to get your feedback on your experience while you were here. Will you take two minutes to complete a brief survey that will help us to improve our website?
Feedback Survey
Thank you for agreeing to provide feedback on the new version of worldbank.org; your response will help us to improve our website.
Thank you for participating in this survey! Your feedback is very helpful to us as we work to improve the site functionality on worldbank.org.