The World Bank's new Program for Results (PforR) instrument is only the third instrument approved by its Board and the first to directly link disbursements to results. Designed to support programs of service delivery, the program is still in its early stages. This paper provides an overview of...

Evaluations are key to learning and accountability yet the quality of those evaluations are critical to their usefulness. We assessed the methodological quality of global health program evaluations commissioned or conducted by five major funders and published between 2009 and 2014. From a...

This paper examines the nature of aid projections in IMF programs with low-income countries. The authors assess the profile of aid broadly and across regions and investigate the compatibility of IMF projections with commitments made at the 2005 Gleneagles G8 Summit to sharply increase aid. On...

Do we still need the World Bank, given how much the global financial sector has expanded since the institution was founded? The paper argues that there is a continuing role for the Bank and that it is complementary to private finance. But fulfilling that role calls for a significant change in...

The World Bank was founded to correct failures in international capital markets. That role has shifted over the past 70 years. Modern analyses should proceed from the premise that the Bank's central goal is and should be to reduce extreme poverty. We show that the vast majority of donor...

The health of the world’s population - including those in the poorest countries - has improved more in the past 100 years than ever before. The improvement is largely a result of the development and spread of cheap, effective technologies (such as vaccines). Other factors, such as national...

A consensus has developed that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is not fulfilling its role, prompting multiple proposals for reform. However, this paper argues that the focus on reform should be complemented with an exploration of alternatives outside the IMF which hold the potential to not...

A common objection to results-based programs is that they are somehow more vulnerable to corruption. This paper explains why results-based approaches to foreign aid may be less vulnerable to corruption than the traditional approaches which monitor and track the purchase and delivery of inputs...

I review the literature on the effects of inequality on growth and development in the developing world. Two stylized facts emerge from empirical studies: inequality is more likely to harm growth in countries at low levels of income (below about $3200 per capita in 2000 dollars); and it is at...