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Do, Quy-Toan

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Do, Quy Toan

Last updated:August 20, 2025

Biography

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).

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https://hdl.handle.net/10986/43608

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Publication Search Results

Now showing1 - 10 of 56

Migration: Africa’s Untapped Potential
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-08-21) Abdel Jelil, Mohamed; Adhikari, Samik; Do, Quy-Toan; Kaila, Heidi; Marzo, Federica; Nsababera, Olive; Seshan, Ganesh; Shrestha, Maheshwor
Migration in Africa is primarily driven by the search for economic opportunity, safety, and security, including from environmental hardships. However, migration’s potential to uplift African livelihoods remains largely untapped. While nearly 15 percent of the world’s migrant population is from Sub-Saharan Africa, two-thirds of Sub-Saharan migrants stay within Africa, and the majority move within regional economic communities. Africa is also home to a quarter of the world’s refugees, primarily hosted in neighboring countries. Africa is now at a pivotal crossroads. With a rapidly growing young population facing economic stagnation, conflict, and climate change, the continent’s workforce is expected to increase by 600 million people by 2050, making up a third of the world’s youth. In contrast, labor forces in high-income and upper-middle-income countries are set to decline by 200 million. This demographic divergence opens a window of opportunity for Africa to enhance its migration management systems. Realizing the potential of migration requires deliberate policies to address challenges and maximize the benefits of migration for both origin and destination countries, as well as for the migrants. Investing in migration systems can better support migrants across the migration cycle, from developing skills in demand domestically, regionally, and globally to ensuring dignity and safety in transit or at their destination. Increasing the number of legal migration pathways is crucial to disincentivize irregular movements and foster safe, orderly migration. Effective migration management also includes promoting integration in host societies and facilitating voluntary returns. This can be achieved through instruments such as bilateral labor migration agreements with destination countries. Entering these agreements as a unified bloc would strengthen individual countries’ bargaining power, improve conditions for migrants, and maximize the economic benefits of migration. Additionally, the empowerment and self-reliance of refugees and internally displaced persons call for increased collaboration among African nations.
Migrants as Social Protection?: Simulations of a Market for Work Permits
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-08) Do, Quy-Toan; Lokshin, Michael M.; Ravallion, Martin
Workers have the right to take up any job offer in their country of citizenship but not to rent out that right. This paper shows that relaxing this restriction using a two-sided competitive market in work permits can provide a basic income guarantee for workers in migration-destination countries, financed by selling temporary work permits to migrant workers. Regulating the market by imposing a tax on work permits narrows the set of beneficiaries, the income of which can further be complemented with the revenues from such tax. Substantial gains in the destination countries’ gross domestic product can be expected, alongside the first-order gains to migrant workers who would not otherwise have access to the labor markets in destination countries. The paper provides a quantitative illustration by simulating a fictitious market for work permits between Mexico and the United States.
Outcomes for Internally Displaced Persons and Refugees in Low and Middle-Income Countries
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-01) Schuettler, Kirsten; Do, Quy-Toan
The paper takes stock of the growing quantitative literature on outcomes for the forcibly displaced in low- and middle-income countries, where 85 percent of refugees and nearly all internally displaced persons live. The main takeaway is that forced dis- placement research has now become a full-fledged sub-field of the migration literature: it addresses the same questions of economic and social integration, returns, and the impact of conditions and policies in the destination country. Yet, the specificity of the sub-field lies in the analysis of migration of a particularly vulnerable population because of the forced selection into displacement and because those forcibly displaced have experienced shocks before and during displacement, including the loss of physical assets, human capital, and mental health.
The Prices in the Crises: What We Are Learning from Twenty Years of Health Insurance in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-02) Das, Jishnu; Do, Quy-Toan
Governments in many low- and middle-income countries are developing health insurance products as a complement to tax-funded, subsidized provision of health care through publicly operated facilities. This paper discusses two rationales for this transition. First, health insurance would boost fiscal revenues for health care, as post-treatment out-of-pocket payments to providers would be replaced by pre-treatment insurance premia to health ministries. Second, increased patient choice and carefully designed physician reimbursements would increase quality in the health care sector. This essay shows that, at best, these objectives have only been partially met. Despite evidence that health insurance has provided financial protection, consumers are not willing to pay for unsubsidized premia. Health outcomes have not improved despite an increase in utilization. The authors argue that this is not because there was no room to improve the quality of care but because behavioral responses among health care providers have systematically undermined the objectives of these insurance schemes.
Transnational Terrorist Recruitment: Evidence from Daesh Personnel Records
(MIT Press, 2022-01-25) Brockmeyer, Anne; Do, Quy-Toan; Joubert, Clement; Bhatia, Kartika; Abdel Jelil, Mohamed
Global terrorist organizations attract radicalized individuals across borders and constitute a threat for both sending and receiving countries. We use unique personnel records from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Daesh) to show that unemployment in sending countries is associated with the number of transnational terrorist recruits from these countries. The relationship is spatially heterogeneous, which is most plausibly attributable to travel costs. We argue that poor labor market opportunities generally push more individuals to join terrorist organizations, but at the same time limit their ability to do so when longer travel distances imply higher migration costs.
Transnational Terrorism and the Internet
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-12) Do, Quy-Toan; Gomez-Parra, Nicolas; Rijkers, Bob
Does the internet enable the recruitment of transnational terrorists Using geo-referenced population census data and personnel records from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant—a highly tech-savvy terrorist organization—this paper shows that internet access has facilitated the organization’s recruitment of foreign fighters from Tunisia. The positive association between internet access and Daesh recruitment is robust to controlling for a large set of observable and unobservable confounders as well as instrumenting internet access rates with the incidence of lightning strikes.
Taxation, Accountability, and Cash Transfers: Breaking the Resource Curse
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-12) Do, Quy-Toan; Devarajan, Shantayanan
Why is governance in resource-rich countries so poor This paper argues that it is because governments in these countries do not rely on taxation, which is an important instrument for citizens to hold their governments accountable. Using a game-theoretic model, the authors show that the combination of low taxes and weak governance can be an equilibrium in an economy with sizeable mineral revenues. As income from natural resources ultimately declines, replacing it with tax revenues may require governments to give control of these proceeds to citizens, in the form of cash transfers say, as a credible commitment to accountability, thereby breaking the country out of its resource curse.
The Globalization of Refugee Flows
(Elsevier, 2021-01-21) Do, Quy-Toan; Devictor, Xavier; Levchenko, Andrei A.
This paper analyzes the spatial distribution of refugees over 1987–2017 and establishes several stylized facts about refugees today compared with past decades. Refugees still predominantly reside in developing countries neighboring their country of origin. However, compared to past decades, refugees today (i) travel longer distances, (ii) are less likely to seek protection in a neighboring country, (iii) are less geographically concentrated, and (iv) are more likely to reside in a high-income OECD country. The findings bring new evidence to the debate on refugee responsibility-sharing.
How Much Oil is the Islamic State Group Producing?: Evidence from Remote Sensing
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-10) Do, Quy-Toan; Shapiro, Jacob N.; Elvidge, Christopher D.; Abdel-Jelil, Mohamed; Ahn, Daniel P.; Baugh, Kimberly; Hansen-Lewis, Jamie; Zhizhin, Mikhail
Accurately measuring oil production in low-governance contexts is an important task. Many terrorist organizations and insurgencies -- including the Islamic State group, also known as ISIL/ISIS or Daesh -- tap oil as a revenue source. Understanding spatial and temporal variation in production in their territory can help address such threats by providing near real-time monitoring of their revenue streams, helping to assess long-term economic potential, and informing reconstruction strategies. More broadly, remotely measuring extractive industry activity in conflict-affected areas and other regions without reliable administrative data can support a broad range of public policy decisions and academic research. This paper uses satellite multi-spectral imaging and ground-truth pre-war output data to effectively construct a real-time day-to-day census of oil production in areas controlled by the terrorist group. The estimates of production levels were approximately 56,000 barrels per day (bpd) from July-December 2014, drop to an average of 35,000 bpd throughout 2015, before dropping further to approximately 16,000 bpd in 2016.
The Intergenerational Mortality Tradeoff of COVID-19 Lockdown Policies
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-05) Ma, Lin; Shapira, Gil; de Walque, Damien; Do, Quy-Toan; Friedman, Jed; Levchenko, Andrei A.
In lower-income countries, the economic contractions that accompany lockdowns to contain the spread of COVID-19 can increase child mortality, counteracting the mortality reductions achieved by the lockdown. To formalize and quantify this effect, this paper builds a macro-susceptible-infected-recovered model that features heterogeneous agents and a country-group-specific relationship between economic downturns and child mortality, and calibrate it to data for 85 countries across all income levels. The findings show that in low-income countries, a lockdown can potentially lead to 1.76 children’s lives lost due to the economic contraction per COVID-19 fatality averted. The ratio stands at 0.59 and 0.06 in lower-middle and upper-middle income countries, respectively. As a result, in some countries lockdowns can actually produce net increases in mortality. In contrast, the optimal lockdown that maximizes the present value of aggregate social welfare is shorter and milder in poorer countries than in rich ones, and never produces a net mortality increase.