"This paper identifies systematic performance differences between younger and older democracies: younger democracies are more corrupt; exhibit less rule of law, lower levels of bureaucratic quality, and lower secondary school enrollments; and spend more on public investment and government...

Markets should give incentives to engage in wider trade, forge the ability to use resources, and skills fully, and provide the opportunity to increase incomes, and accumulate assets. Despite underlying problems, many people in both developed, and developing countries do engage in productive, and...

The beginning of the new millennium finds the Latin America and Caribbean region having made progress on several fronts. Health and education indicators continue to improve and all but one country hosts democratically elected governments. However, poverty rates are still high - 34.6 percent in...

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...