This paper assesses the benefits, risks, and limitations of human rights based approaches to development, which can be catalogued on the basis of the institutional mechanisms they rely on: global compliance based on international and regional treaties; the policies and programming of donors and...

This paper provides a review of the literature on the development impact of migration and remittances on origin countries and on destination countries in the South. International migration is an ever-growing phenomenon that has important development implications for both sending and receiving...

In the past 30 years, China has achieved phenomenal economic growth, an unprecedented development "miracle" in human history. How did China achieve this rapid growth? What have been its key drivers? And, most important, what can be learned from China's success? Policy makers, business people,...

Broad consensus exists that the ability of political actors to make credible commitments is key to development. An important and little-explored determinant of the credibility of political commitments is the existence of organizations that facilitate citizen collective action to sanction...

Empirical evidence suggests that money in the hands of mothers (as opposed to their husbands) benefits children. Does this observation imply that targeting transfers to women is good economic policy? The authors develop a series of noncooperative family bargaining models to understand what kind...

In many cases, the relationship between environmental pollution and economic development can be generally depicted by an inverted U-shaped curve, or an environmental Kuznets curve, where pollution increases with income at the beginning and decreases after a certain level of income. However, what...

This report reviews the literature on the links between energy access, welfare, and gender in order to provide evidence on where gender considerations in the energy sector matter and how they might be addressed. Prepared as a background document for the 2012 World Development Report on Gender...

This paper examines the evolving importance of banks and securities markets during the process of economic development. As economies develop, they increase their demand for the services provided by securities markets relative to those provided by banks, such that securities markets become...

This paper analyzes the bright and dark sides of the financial development process through the lenses of the four fundamental frictions to which agents are exposed -- information asymmetry, enforcement, collective action, and collective cognition. Financial development is shaped by the efforts...

This essay first sets out the "business model" problems entailed by corruption and their effects as well as implications for economic growth. Key issues are the need for secrecy and co-operation with partners in crime. Dealing with these leads to behavior which is ostensibly bizarre and...