To what extent does increased corruption in a country lead to greater levels of internal conflict in the form of riots, strikes and anti-government demonstrations? This column reports new evidence from Iran over the past 60 years.

The African continent is much larger than it appears on standard maps of the world. As explained in this column, first published at Le Monde, this distorted projection method has many consequences, particularly in the area of agriculture.

While employment rates in countries in the Middle East and North Africa have largely recovered since the initial shock of the pandemic, wages and hours of work have been more variable in response to changing economic conditions. As research reported in this column shows, non-wage and informal wage workers have been particularly vulnerable to the negative impacts of Covid-19.

Across the world, Covid-19 and associated policy measures that closed schools and nurseries led to increased care work for married women in households with young or school-aged children. But as research reported in this column shows, in the Middle East and North Africa, married women had already selected out of the types of work that were difficult to reconcile with care work, with the result that married women did not exit employment disproportionately during the pandemic.