Jordan faces extremely high levels of youth unemployment: 19 percent of male and 48 percent of female youth between the ages of 19 to 24 years old want to work but can't find jobs. For men, the transition from school to work is slow (on average 15 months), but for women the school to work...

The primary objective of this report is to provide brief, relevant, and practical tools for World Bank task teams and their country counterparts to facilitate their work in addressing gender issues in transport policies and projects. This responds to the need, expressed by task teams, to...

In Thailand, enhancing workforce skills and promoting innovation is part of the country's strategy to facilitate the transformation toward a more knowledge-intensive and creative economy generating good jobs. This report provides valuable insight for Thailand to develop the skills necessary to...

This report is the final product of a project financed by a grant from the World Bank's Youth Innovation Fund developed in conjunction with representatives of the Government of Sierra Leone (GoSL) spanning the period December 2011-June 2012. The report is an advisory document to assist the GoSL...

Introduction : toward better practices in systemic corporate restructuring / Michael Pomerleano -- Ch. 1. Synopsis of conference papers / William Shaw -- Ch. 2. Policy approaches to corporate restructuring around the world : what worked, what failed? / Stijn Claessens -- Ch. 3. Recent...

Development involves change, but many development initiatives produce unimpressive results. The authors ask why and consider how to close the gap between the intended change and what we actually see in the evidence. This paper presents the findings of a study, initiated by the multi-donor Global...

"This paper uses firm-level data from the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Surveys to study the process of convergence of transition countries with developed market economies. The study focuses on competition and market structure, finance and the structure of lending to firms, and...

"The authors study the effect of reorganization costs on the efficiency of bankruptcy laws. They develop a simple model that predicts that in a regime with high costs, the law fails to achieve the efficient outcome of liquidating unviable businesses and reorganizing viable ones. The authors test...

"Since the early 1980s, China has begun gradually integrating with the global system. In doing so the country has moved toward its own unique brand of market socialism, which recognizes private ownership, and is adopting market institutions and pursuing industrial change within the framework of...