The COVID-19 crisis has hit everywhere at once. Lower-income countries should not expect large inflows of aid; they will be left largely to their own resources. Those resources are limited, so lower-income countries need to find leverage wherever they can.

This paper, by He, Wang and Zhang (2020), estimates the effect of environmental regulation on firm productivity using a spatial regression discontinuity design implicit in China's water quality monitoring system.

In this paper, Limodio (2020) investigates the effect of terrorism financing and recruitment on attacks. A Sharia-compliant institution in Pakistan induces exogenous variation in the funding of terrorist groups through their religious affiliation.

In principle, firms in developing countries benefit from the fact that advanced technologies and products have already been developed in industrialized countries and can simply be adopted, a process often referred to as industrial upgrading.