This publication addresses the question of whether political, fiscal, and administrative decentralization improves government effectiveness and the debate on whether it is a viable and desirable state-building strategy for post-conflict countries. The publication is a collection of eight papers...

"Keefer and Vlaicu demonstrate that sharply different policy choices across democracies can be explained as a consequence of differences in the ability of political competitors to make credible pre-electoral commitments to voters. Politicians can overcome their credibility deficit in two ways....

Mexico is in the midst of a transition. The defeat of the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) in the 2000 presidential election marked a watershed, and with the repeated defeat of the PRI in the 2006 election, the era of the single?party dominance appears to be long gone. The demise of the...

"This paper exploits the transitions between tax-financed health care and social health insurance in the OECD countries over the period 1960-2006 to assess the effects of adopting social health insurance over tax finance on per capita health spending, amenable mortality, and labor market...

"Much attention has focused on the impact of the current crisis on goods trade; hardly any on its impact on services trade. Using new trade data from the United States, and more aggregate data from other OECD countries, the authors show that services trade is weathering the current crisis much...

"This paper assesses the impact that a potential liberalization of sugar regimes in OECD countries could have on household labor income and poverty in Brazil. The authors first estimate the extent of price transmission from world markets to 11 Brazilian states to capture the fact that some local...