The unanticipated spike in international food prices in 2007-08 hit many developing countries hard. International prices for food and other agricultural products increased by more than 100 percent between early 2007 and mid-2008. Prices for food cereals more than doubled; and those for rice...

A Development Emergency: the title of this year's Global Monitoring Report, the sixth in an annual series, could not be more apt. The global economic crisis, the most severe since the Great Depression, is rapidly turning into a human and development crisis. No region is immune. The poor...

The Annual Review of Development Effectiveness 2009 presents evidence on the World Bank’s efforts in two areas. Part I tracks the outcomes of Bank projects and country programs and the evolution of monitoring and evaluation (M&E). Part II examines the Bank’s support for environmentally...