The international community is committed to helping partner countries meet the Millennium Development Goal of halving global poverty by 2015. Providing more effective aid and increasing its impact on development is one important contribution to this end. This report takes stock of progress made...

"The author critically reviews the methods available for the ex-post counterfactual analysis of programs that are assigned exclusively to individuals, households, or locations. The discussion covers both experimental and non-experimental methods (including propensity-score matching,...

"The authors apply the dynamic macroeconomic framework developed by Agnor, Bayraktar, and El Aynaoui (2004) to Niger. As in the original model, linkages between foreign aid, public investment (disaggregated into education, infrastructure, and health), and growth are explicitly captured. Although...

"While providing the most reliable method of evaluating social programs, randomized experiments in industrial and developing countries alike are accompanied by political risks and ethical issues that jeopardize the chances of adopting them. Buddelmeyer and Skoufias use a unique data set from...

The Poverty and Social Impact Assessment (PSIA) analyzes the impact of the tax reform, which came into effect in July 2007, on tax incidence and poverty in Uruguay. The essence of the reform is the introduction of a dual personal income tax, which taxes labor income at progressive rates and...

The rapid economic growth since 2000 has been the main driver of poverty reduction in Romania. However, even under the current positive growth scenario, there are still people who live in poverty, and some who are unlikely to benefit from future growth and thus may continue to be left behind....