Download or read book The World Bank Research Observer written by and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dangers of Decentralization written by Remy Prud'homme and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 1994 with total page 43 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demand for decentralization is strong in most parts of the world. This close look at the negative side effects of improperly appled decentralization is not an attack on decentralization but an effort to prevent its misapplication -- and to promote fuller understanding and wiser use of this potentially desirable policy.
Download or read book New Structural Economics written by Justin Yifu Lin and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an innovative framework to analyze the process of industrial upgrading and diversification, a key feature of economic development. Based on this framework, it provides concrete advice to development practitioners and policy makers on how to unleash a country's growth potential.
Download or read book Democracy Public Expenditures and the Poor written by Philip Keefer and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2003 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Countries vary systematically with respect to the incentives of politicians to provide broad public goods, and to reduce poverty. Even in developing countries that are democracies, politicians often have incentives to divert resources to political rents, and to private transfers that benefit a few citizens at the expense of many. These distortions can be traced to imperfections in political markets, that are greater in some countries than in others. The authors review the theory, and evidence on the impact of incomplete information of voters, the lack of credibility of political promises, and social polarization on political incentives. They argue that the effects of these imperfections are large, but that their implications are insufficiently integrated into the design of policy reforms aimed at improving the provision of public goods, and reducing poverty.
Download or read book World Development Report 2018 written by World Bank Group and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2017-10-16 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every year, the World Bank’s World Development Report (WDR) features a topic of central importance to global development. The 2018 WDR—LEARNING to Realize Education’s Promise—is the first ever devoted entirely to education. And the time is right: education has long been critical to human welfare, but it is even more so in a time of rapid economic and social change. The best way to equip children and youth for the future is to make their learning the center of all efforts to promote education. The 2018 WDR explores four main themes: First, education’s promise: education is a powerful instrument for eradicating poverty and promoting shared prosperity, but fulfilling its potential requires better policies—both within and outside the education system. Second, the need to shine a light on learning: despite gains in access to education, recent learning assessments reveal that many young people around the world, especially those who are poor or marginalized, are leaving school unequipped with even the foundational skills they need for life. At the same time, internationally comparable learning assessments show that skills in many middle-income countries lag far behind what those countries aspire to. And too often these shortcomings are hidden—so as a first step to tackling this learning crisis, it is essential to shine a light on it by assessing student learning better. Third, how to make schools work for all learners: research on areas such as brain science, pedagogical innovations, and school management has identified interventions that promote learning by ensuring that learners are prepared, teachers are both skilled and motivated, and other inputs support the teacher-learner relationship. Fourth, how to make systems work for learning: achieving learning throughout an education system requires more than just scaling up effective interventions. Countries must also overcome technical and political barriers by deploying salient metrics for mobilizing actors and tracking progress, building coalitions for learning, and taking an adaptive approach to reform.
Download or read book Building Institutions for Markets written by World Bank and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2002 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Institutions fix the confines of and impose form upon the activities of human beings.' --Walton Hamilton, 'Institutions', 1932. The 'World Development Report 2002: Building Institutions for Markets' undertakes the complex issue of the basic institutions needed for markets to function properly. This year's 'World Development Report' goes beyond a simple examination of institutional structure and explores the functions of institutions. Recognizing that one size does not fit all, the report asks what do all institutions which support markets do? The answer is simple: Institutions channel information, define and enforce property rights, and increase or prevent competition. Understanding the functions that current institutions and their proposed replacements would provide is the first step. The report contends that once you have identified the institutional functions that are missing, you can then build effective institutions by following some basic principles: - Complement what exists already - in terms of other supporting institutions, human capacities, and technology. - Innovate to suit local norms and conditions. Experimenting with new structures can provide a country with creative solutions that work. - Connect communities of market players through open information flows and open trade. Open trade and information flows create demand for new institutions and improve the functioning of existing structures. - Compete among jurisdictions, firms, and individuals. Increased competition creates demand for new institutions as old ones lose their effectiveness. It also affects how people behave - improving institutional quality. These broad lessons and careful analyses, which links theory with pertinent evidence, are provided in the report. 'World Development Report 2002: Building Institutions for Markets' contains selected 'World Development Indicators'.
Download or read book World Development Report 2019 written by World Bank and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2018-10-31 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Work is constantly reshaped by technological progress. New ways of production are adopted, markets expand, and societies evolve. But some changes provoke more attention than others, in part due to the vast uncertainty involved in making predictions about the future. The 2019 World Development Report will study how the nature of work is changing as a result of advances in technology today. Technological progress disrupts existing systems. A new social contract is needed to smooth the transition and guard against rising inequality. Significant investments in human capital throughout a person’s lifecycle are vital to this effort. If workers are to stay competitive against machines they need to train or retool existing skills. A social protection system that includes a minimum basic level of protection for workers and citizens can complement new forms of employment. Improved private sector policies to encourage startup activity and competition can help countries compete in the digital age. Governments also need to ensure that firms pay their fair share of taxes, in part to fund this new social contract. The 2019 World Development Report presents an analysis of these issues based upon the available evidence.
Download or read book Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2020 written by World Bank and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2020-12-23 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edition of the biennial Poverty and Shared Prosperity report brings sobering news. The COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic and its associated economic crisis, compounded by the effects of armed conflict and climate change, are reversing hard-won gains in poverty reduction and shared prosperity. The fight to end poverty has suffered its worst setback in decades after more than 20 years of progress. The goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030, already at risk before the pandemic, is now beyond reach in the absence of swift, significant, and sustained action, and the objective of advancing shared prosperity—raising the incomes of the poorest 40 percent in each country—will be much more difficult. Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2020: Reversals of Fortune presents new estimates of COVID-19's impacts on global poverty and shared prosperity. Harnessing fresh data from frontline surveys and economic simulations, it shows that pandemic-related job losses and deprivation worldwide are hitting already poor and vulnerable people hard, while also shifting the profile of global poverty to include millions of 'new poor.' Original analysis included in the report shows that the new poor are more urban, better educated, and less likely to work in agriculture than those living in extreme poverty before COVID-19. It also gives new estimates of the impact of conflict and climate change, and how they overlap. These results are important for targeting policies to safeguard lives and livelihoods. It shows how some countries are acting to reverse the crisis, protect those most vulnerable, and promote a resilient recovery. These findings call for urgent action. If the global response fails the world's poorest and most vulnerable people now, the losses they have experienced to date will be minimal compared with what lies ahead. Success over the long term will require much more than stopping COVID-19. As efforts to curb the disease and its economic fallout intensify, the interrupted development agenda in low- and middle-income countries must be put back on track. Recovering from today's reversals of fortune requires tackling the economic crisis unleashed by COVID-19 with a commitment proportional to the crisis itself. In doing so, countries can also plant the seeds for dealing with the long-term development challenges of promoting inclusive growth, capital accumulation, and risk prevention—particularly the risks of conflict and climate change.
Download or read book The Case for Industrial Policy written by Howard Pack and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2006 with total page 51 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the underlying rationales for industrial policy? Does empirical evidence support the use of industrial policy for correcting market failures that plague the process of industrialization? To address these questions, the authors provide a critical survey of the analytical literature on industrial policy. They also review some recent industry successes and argue that only a limited role was played by public interventions. Moreover, the recent ascendance of international industrial networks, which dominate the sectors in which less developed countries have in the past had considerable success, implies a further limitation on the potential role of industrial policies as traditionally understood. Overall, there appears to be little empirical support for an activist government policy even though market failures exist that can, in principle, justify the use of industrial policy.
Download or read book The Economics of the Government Budget Constraint written by Stanley Fischer and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 1989 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Making Schools Work written by Barbara Bruns and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2011 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is about the threats to education quality in the developing world that cannot be explained by lack of resources. It reviews the observed phenomenon of service delivery failures in public education: cases where programs and policies increase the inputs to education but do not produce effective services where it counts - in schools and classrooms. It documents what we know about the extent and costs of such failures across low and middle-income countries. And it further develops the conceptual model posited in the World Development Report 2004: that a root cause of low-quality and inequitable public services - not only in education - is the weak accountability of providers to both their supervisors and clients.The central focus of the book, however, is a new story. It is that developing countries are increasingly adopting innovative strategies to attack these problems. Drawing on new evidence from 22 rigorous impact evaluations across 11 developing countries, this book examines how three key strategies to strengthen accountability relationships in developing country school systems have affected school enrollment, completion and student learning. The book reviews the motivation and global context for education reforms aimed at strengthening provider accountability. It provides the rationally and synthesizes the evidence on the impacts of three key lines of reform: (1) policies that use the power of information to strengthen the ability of clients of education services (students and their parents) to hold providers accountable for results; (2) policies that promote school-based management?that is increase schools? autonomy to make key decisions and control resources, often empowering parents to play a larger role; (3) teacher incentives reforms that specifically aim at making teachers more accountable for results, either by making contract tenure dependent on performance, or offering performance-linked pay. The book summarizes the lessons learned, draws cautious conclusions about possible complementarities across different types of accountability-focused reforms if they are implemented in tandem, considers issues related to scaling up reform efforts and the political economy of reform, and suggests directions for future work."
Download or read book World Development Report 1978 written by and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 1978 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first report deals with some of the major development issues confronting the developing countries and explores the relationship of the major trends in the international economy to them. It is designed to help clarify some of the linkages between the international economy and domestic strategies in the developing countries against the background of growing interdependence and increasing complexity in the world economy. It assesses the prospects for progress in accelerating growth and alleviating poverty, and identifies some of the major policy issues which will affect these prospects.
Download or read book World Bank Research Observer written by World Bank Publications and published by . This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The World Bank Research Observer written by and published by . This book was released on 2010-02 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book World Development Report 2017 written by World Bank Group and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2017-01-23 with total page 605 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why are carefully designed, sensible policies too often not adopted or implemented? When they are, why do they often fail to generate development outcomes such as security, growth, and equity? And why do some bad policies endure? World Development Report 2017: Governance and the Law addresses these fundamental questions, which are at the heart of development. Policy making and policy implementation do not occur in a vacuum. Rather, they take place in complex political and social settings, in which individuals and groups with unequal power interact within changing rules as they pursue conflicting interests. The process of these interactions is what this Report calls governance, and the space in which these interactions take place, the policy arena. The capacity of actors to commit and their willingness to cooperate and coordinate to achieve socially desirable goals are what matter for effectiveness. However, who bargains, who is excluded, and what barriers block entry to the policy arena determine the selection and implementation of policies and, consequently, their impact on development outcomes. Exclusion, capture, and clientelism are manifestations of power asymmetries that lead to failures to achieve security, growth, and equity. The distribution of power in society is partly determined by history. Yet, there is room for positive change. This Report reveals that governance can mitigate, even overcome, power asymmetries to bring about more effective policy interventions that achieve sustainable improvements in security, growth, and equity. This happens by shifting the incentives of those with power, reshaping their preferences in favor of good outcomes, and taking into account the interests of previously excluded participants. These changes can come about through bargains among elites and greater citizen engagement, as well as by international actors supporting rules that strengthen coalitions for reform.
Download or read book The Millennium Development Goals for Health written by Adam Wagstaff and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation Provides information on progress and trends, including poornonpoor disparities; health systems reform as a means of laying building blocks for the efficient and equitable delivery of effective interventions; the financing of health spending through domestic resources and aid; and improving the effectiveness of development assistance in health. Linking the health Millennium Development Goals? agenda with the broader poverty-reduction agenda, this book is a valuable resource for policymakers in developing countries and development practitioners working in the health, nutrition, and population sector as well as students and scholars of public health.
Download or read book Doing Business in 2004 written by Simeon Djankov and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2004 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A co-publication of the World Bank, International Finance Corporation and Oxford University Press
