This chapter highlights the growing global and European financial inclusion agenda and provides a brief assessment of vulnerability and labor market outcomes for Roma in Eastern Europe. Financial inclusion is considered by many to be among the main instruments to improve welfare, especially...

"Loayza and Soto present policy and outcome-based ways of measuring the progress of market-oriented reforms in both traditional areas of first-generation reform and the areas of institutional reform that have been emphasized lately. These policy areas are the domestic financial system,...

This report provides an integrated view of Sri Lanka's long term development challenges for sustainable growth and poverty reduction. Sri Lanka's substantial achievements in human development are well known. In several dimensions - such as universal primary enrollment, gender equality, infant...

1992 was both a year of bitterness and hope. A decade of civil war had devastated the country but left no clear winner or loser; it was time to try peace. The governing ARENA party and the FMLN rebels signed peace accords requiring the demobilization of the FMLN and its incorporation into the...

"This paper examines the impact of trade with Japan, North America, and the European Union on technology diffusion and total factor productivity growth in Korea, Mexico, and Jordan. Measures of foreign research and development are constructed based on industry-specific research and development...

"The empirical literature on environmental performance or compliance has followed two strands: one based on the impact of formal regulation as a means of inducing better environmental performance, and another centered on the role of informal regulation which mainly emphasizes the role of...

"The health systems of Japan and the Asian Tigers--Hong Kong (China), the Republic of Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan (China)--and the recent reforms to them provide many potentially valuable lessons to East Asia's developing countries. All five systems have managed to keep a check on health...