"The paper analyzes governments' tradeoff between fiscal benefits and consumer surplus in privatization reforms of noncompetitive industries in developing countries. Under privatization, the control rights are transferred to private interests so that public subsidies decline. This benefit for...

This paper has been prepared in accordance with the terms of reference for a study on power system planning in India: incorporating externality costs and benefits. It reviews estimates of the external costs of power in international studies as well as in India and compares the figures available....

Cost-benefit analysis used to be one of the World Bank's signature issues. It helped establish its reputation as the knowledge Bank and served to demonstrate its commitment to measuring results and ensuring accountability to taxpayers. It was the Bank's answer to the results agenda long before...

The purpose of this report is to improve the knowledge base for facilitating investments in land management technologies that sequester soil organic carbon. While there are many studies on soil carbon sequestration, there is no single unifying volume that synthesizes knowledge on the impact of...

International policies to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD+) envisage the creation of financial incentive mechanisms that reward forest protection efforts and adequately compensate those actors that face new costs. In order for REDD+ to achieve these objectives,...

"Recent literature and new data help determine plausible bounds to some key demographic differences between the poor and non-poor in the developing world. The author estimates that selective mortality-whereby poorer people tend to have higher death rates-accounts for 10-30 percent of the...

"Model uncertainty hampers consensus on the key determinants of economic growth. Some recent cross-country, cross-sectional analyses have employed Bayesian Model Averaging to address the issue of model uncertainty. This paper extends that approach to panel data models with country-specific fixed...

"The author assesses empirically the relationship between natural disaster risk and investment in education. Although the results in the empirical literature tend to be inconclusive, using model averaging methods in the framework of cross-country and panel regressions, this paper finds an...