This paper summarizes the policy-relevant insights of a generation of research on scale economies. Scale economies in production are of three types: internal economies associated with large plants, localization economies that come from sharing of inputs and infrastructure and from greater...

Development is accompanied by significant spatial transformations--changes in the distribution of people and economic activities. The World Development Report 2009 Reshaping Economic Geography draws lessons from history and academic research to develop a concise framework for understanding these...

Over the past 25 years, significant levels of public debt and external finance are more likely to have enhanced macroeconomic vulnerability than economic growth in developing countries. This applies not just to countries with a history of high inflation and past default, but also to those in...

Since we introduced the term “middle-income trap” in 2006, it has become popular among policy makers and researchers. In May 2015, a search of Google Scholar returned more than 3,000 articles including the term and about 300 articles with the term in the title. This paper provides a...

Since we introduced the term ?middle-income trap? in 2006, it has become popular among policy makers and researchers. In May 2015, a search of Google Scholar returned more than 3,000 articles including the term and about 300 articles with the term in the title. This paper provides a...

At the Frontlines of Development former World Bank country directors recount their experiences, both as managers of the World Bank's programs in global economic hotspots of the 1990s as well as throughout their careers in development economics. These essays detail, among many stories of...

Nations around the world (both large and small, rich and poor) are engaged in debate over how to reform their social security systems and care for the aged. For many countries this debate requires speculation on hypothetical scenarios, but in Latin America a rich body of experience on social...

Nothing impacts the welfare of individuals and households more directly than employment and earnings opportunities. In developing countries, labor market reform is a crucial component for the success of overall economic policy reforms. Despite success in other areas of economic reform over the...

This report focuses not only on the gaps facing Latin America in both education and technology, but especially on the interactions between the two. The central premise of the report is that skills and technology interact in important ways, and this relationship is a fundamental reason for the...

This report is about the twelve countries of the former Soviet Union (Eurasia). About 85 percent of the region???s economic output is in six resource-rich economies. Today, 85 percent of Eurasia???s 280 million people are no longer poor. But academics who study resource-based economies debate...