The Doha Development Agenda of the Fourth Ministerial Conference of the WTO opened many contentious and important questions. Global Economic Prospects 2004: Realizing the Development Promise of the Doha Agenda analyzes the most critical multilateral trade issues and suggests policy options that...

The international community finds itself at a crossroads as it approaches the last quarter of 2003. Will the Doha Agenda regenerate the multilateral consensus that has been the hallmark of successive rounds of trade liberalization since 1947 and in doing so provide new impetus for global...

"The paper evaluates the effects of privatization in the post-communist economies and China. In post-communist economies privatization to foreign owners results in a rapid improvement in performance of firms, while performance effects of privatization to domestic owners are less impressive and...

"The relationship between wealth and child labor has been widely examined. This paper uses three rounds of time-series, cross-sectional data to examine the relationship between wealth and child labor and schooling. The paper finds that wealth is crucial in determining a child's activities, but...

"Ownership and control over assets such as land and housing provide direct and indirect benefits to individuals and households, including a secure place to live, the means of a livelihood, protection during emergencies, and collateral for credit that can be used for investment or consumption....

"The authors use data on 27,000 firms from 50 countries, half of which are transition economies, together with the case of Serbia to examine the relationship between productivity, the investment climate, and private ownership of firms. As government capacity to address investment climate...

This publication is the product of a multi-year cluster analytical and advisory work on social and land conflict management of the World Bank office in Hanoi, which aimed to assist Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MoNRE) to improve the land acquisition and conversion process to...

"Financial sector development fosters economic growth and reduces poverty by widening and broadening access to finance and allocating society's savings more efficiently. The author first discusses three pillars on which sound and efficient financial systems are built: macroeconomic stability and...