Person:
Timmis, Jonathan

Last updated: May 22, 2025

Biography

Jonathan Timmis is a Senior Economist in the Office of the Chief Economist for East Asia and the Pacific at the World Bank, where he researches the areas of digitalization and technological change, productivity and globalization. Before joining the Bank, Jonathan worked for the IFC, the OECD Productivity and Business Dynamics Division and as an Overseas Development Institute Fellow in Rwanda. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Nottingham and has published in several academic journals including the Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Economic Geography and Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

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Now showing 1 - 8 of 8

Firm Foundations of Growth: Productivity and Technology in East Asia and Pacific
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-22) de Nicola, Francesca; Mattoo, Aaditya; Timmis, Jonathan
In an era of rapid global technological change, productivity growth in the East Asia and Pacific (EAP) region has decelerated. The most-productive firms in EAP, the “national frontier,” are lagging behind the world’s leading firms, the “global frontier,” particularly in the digital-intensive sectors driving innovation. This widening gap is critical, as these national frontier firms are pivotal to output, employment, and the dissemination of advanced technologies to other domestic enterprises. Detailed firm-level analysis reveals that barriers to competition are stifling incentives to innovate and are inhibiting the movement of workers and capital to more-productive firms. At the same time, inadequate skills and infrastructure are constraining the region’s capacity to innovate. "Firm Foundations of Growth: Productivity and Technology in East Asia and Pacific" argues that enhancing competition, bolstering digital infrastructure, and developing relevant skills can reignite productivity growth across the region, particularly for frontier firms. This book will be of interest to researchers, businesses, and policy makers dedicated to understanding and addressing the productivity challenges in the EAP region.
Technological Decoupling? The Impact on Innovation of US Restrictions on Chinese Firms
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-23) Cao, Yu; de Nicola, Francesca; Mattoo, Aaditya; Timmis, Jonathan
Recent U.S.-China tensions have raised the specter of technological decoupling. This paper examines the impact of U.S. export restrictions and technology licensing on Chinese firms’ innovation. It finds that U.S. sanctions reduce the quantity and quality of patent outputs of targeted Chinese firms, primarily due to decreased collaboration with U.S. inventors. However, firms with higher initial patent stock or in sectors with a smaller technological distance to the U.S. are less affected. Sanctions in specific technology fields lead to a decline in the patent output of both Chinese firms with U.S. collaborators and U.S. firms with Chinese collaborators.
Do Capital Incentives Distort Technology Diffusion? Evidence on Cloud, Big Data and AI
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-09-19) DeStefano, Timothy; Johnstone, Nick; Kneller, Richard; Timmis, Jonathan
The arrival of cloud computing provides firms a new way to access digital technologies as digital services. Yet, capital incentive policies present in every OECD country are still targeted towards investments in information technology (IT) capital. If cloud services are partial substitutes for IT investments, the presence of capital incentive policies by unintentionally discourage the adoption of cloud and technologies that rely on the cloud, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and big data analytics. This paper exploits a tax incentive in the UK for capital investment as a quasi-natural experiment to examine the impact on firm adoption of loud computing, big data analytics and AI. The empirical results find that the policy increased investment in IT capital as would be expected; but it slowed firm adoption of cloud, big data and AI. Matched employer-employee data shows that the policy also led firms to reduce their demand for workers that perform data analytics, but not other types of workers
Agglomeration Economies in Developing Countries: A Meta-Analysis
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-07) Timmis, Jonathan; Grover, Arti; Lall, Somik V.
Recent empirical work suggests that there are large agglomeration gains from working and living in developing country cities. These estimates find that doubling city size is associated with an increase in productivity by 19 percent in China, 12 percent in India, and 17 percent in Africa. These agglomeration benefits are considerably higher relative to developed country cities, which are in the range of 4 to 6 percent. However, many developing country cities are costly, crowded, and disconnected, and face slow structural transformation. To understand the true productivity advantages of cities in developing countries, this paper systematically evaluates more than 1,200 elasticity estimates from 70 studies in 33 countries. Using a frontier methodology for conducting meta-analysis, it finds that the elasticity estimates in developing countries are at most 1 percentage point higher than in advanced economies, but not significantly so. The paper provides novel estimates of the elasticity of pollution, homicide, and congestion, using a large sample of developing and developed country cities. No evidence is found for productivity gains in light of the high and increasing costs of working in developing country cities.
Global Transition Online
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-03-03) Ragoussis, Alexandros; Timmis, Jonathan
This paper presents new evidence on the growth of digital technology in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It uses the largest and most comprehensive database available to analyze website birth dynamics and the uptake of website technologies. The database comprises 150 million active websites and 27,000 technologies. The findings show that, over 2020, there was rapid adoption of both e-commerce and online payments across all countries, with greatest rates of adoption in countries that had lower initial levels of technology use. The timing of COVID-19 lockdowns strongly predicts increased use of these technologies, accounting for about a third of the overall increase in e-commerce or online payments usage over 2020. More importantly the shock appears to have resulted in a shift in trend more so than a shift in level, suggesting that COVID-19 may have transformed the trajectory of online market growth.
Robots and Export Quality
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-05) DeStefano, Timothy; Timmis, Jonathan
Robots are rapidly becoming a key part of manufacturing in developed and emerging economies. This paper examines a new channel for how automation can affect international trade: quality upgrading. Automation can reduce production errors, particularly of repetitive processes, leading to higher quality products. The effects of robot use on export quality are estimated, by combining cross-country and cross-industry data on industrial robots with detailed Harmonized System 10-digit trade data. Robot diffusion in (preexisting) foreign customers is used as an instrumental variable to predict robot adoption in the home country-industry. The findings show that robot diffusion leads to increases in the quality of exported products. Quality improvements are predominantly driven by the upgrading of developing country exports; and within countries, quality improvements are driven by upgrading of (initially) lower-quality exports of developed and developing countries. The paper also finds some differences in the type of robots—sophisticated or more basic—associated with quality gains in developing and developed economies.
Small and Medium Enterprises in the Pandemic: Impact, Responses and the Role of Development Finance
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-09) Adian, Ikmal; Doumbia, Djeneba; Gregory, Neil; Ragoussis, Alexandros; Reddy, Aarti; Timmis, Jonathan
This study highlights how COVID-19 has affected small and medium enterprises, drawing on newly released World Bank Enterprise Surveys in 13 countries. The study shows that firms of all sizes are severely affected in multiple dimensions; however, firm size matters for the intensity of the different channels of transmission and firms' responses. Small and medium enterprise sales shrink by more and their cash drains faster than large firms in the same sector and country. Among them, faster growing firms experience the demand shock somewhat less severely, but they are more exposed to international trade disruption, supply, and finance shocks. Yet, a range of firm responses to the downturn seem to be out of reach. Fewer small and medium-size enterprises, for example, start remote work, leaving their workers exposed to health risks. To make it through the pandemic, the majority of smaller firms do not turn to banks for loans; they need grants. Although development finance is not enough to fill the financing gap, development finance institutions are relevant -- in investment mobilization, demonstration, and know-how -- as economies move toward recovery and rebuilding. Delivering these requires rapid efforts to build partnerships and gather information in places where development finance has been limited in the past.
Productivity in the Time of COVID-19: Evidence from East Asia and Pacific
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-04-26) de Nicola, Francesca; Timmis, Jonathan; Tran, Trang Thu; Mattoo, Aaditya
Firms in the East Asia and Pacific (EAP) region have been hit hard by the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic, with dramatic and widespread falls in sales and employment. Firm sales in some EAP countries were 38 to 58 percent lower in April or May 2020, compared to the same month in the previous year. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have been particularly affected. The pandemic will have a lasting impact on productivity growth as firm indebtedness and increased uncertainty inhibit investment, and firm closures and unemployment lead to a loss of valuable intangible assets. Support for firms is needed but must be based as far as possible on objective criteria, related not only to past performance or current pain but to the potential for firms, including new firms, to thrive in the future. To avoid unduly prolonging assistance, governments should build exit strategies into the design of support measures and commit to phasing support out by linking it to observable macroeconomic indicators of recovery.