WBG Pioneer

The Trade Policy and Facilitation Unit is developing a quantitative spatial model to assess the spatial economic impacts of logistics infrastructure, logistics and trade facilitation policies, and trade policies at the national and regional levels. Building on a cities spatial model developed jointly by the International Growth Centre (IGC) and the World Bank, the unit intends to extend this framework beyond the city level and to develop it in partnership with the Development Economics (DEC) group, the Transport global practice, and external partners. The model is intended to complement the unit’s existing computable general equilibrium (CGE) analysis. This work also builds on a long tradition of World Bank analysis of the sub-national geography of trade, including work on lagging regions and their connection to global markets, and seeks to capture the substantial methodological and data advances that have emerged since. Robust spatial analysis of this kind depends critically on the assembly, cleaning, and structuring of high-quality geospatial data used to parameterize and run the model. The intern will support this effort within the Trade Policy and Facilitation Unit, contributing to the compilation and preparation of geospatial datasets and to the operation of the quantitative spatial model, under the supervision of the project team. Duties and Responsibilities Under the guidance of the project lead, the intern will: • Compile, clean, and structure the geospatial data required to parameterize and run the quantitative spatial (“cities”) model, extending it from the city level to the national and regional levels. • Assemble and process key spatial inputs — including road and transport networks, population grids, terrain data, port and trade-node locations (e.g., PortWatch), and travel-time layers — into model-ready formats. • Run the spatial model with the prepared data to assess the spatial economic impacts of logistics infrastructure, trade facilitation measures, and trade policies, in coordination with DEC, Transport, and external partners. • Construct population-weighted accessibility and remoteness indicators to key trade nodes and correlate them with granular socio-economic data. • Produce maps, interactive dashboards, and other visual outputs to support diagnostics, model validation, and dissemination. • Contribute to note writing, presentations, and other analytical and dissemination products, and document data sources, methods, and code for reproducibility.