The World Bank began a three-year pilot initiative to develop a framework for enhancing development benefits to local communities in hydropower projects. There has been a wide array of approaches in the past two decades that all have in common the objective of designing and implementing means...

This study examines the gender profile of the Russian Federation through a comprehensive review of the current literature (1248 publications on gender issues throughout the transition decade) on the conditions of women and men and on the gender disparities in a number of indicators. The report...

National systems for environmental and social impact assessment (ESIA) are designed to improve the environmental and social performance of projects and support countries' sustainable development strategies. The objectives of this Literature Review are to identify trends, findings and gaps in...

"Microfinance has been heralded as an effective way to address imperfections in credit markets. But from a theoretical perspective, the success of microfinance contracts has puzzling elements. In particular, the group-based mechanisms often employed are vulnerable to free-riding and collusion,...

"The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of the changes in the calculation of minimum regulatory capital requirements for credit risk that have been drafted by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (Basel II). Even though the revised credit capital rules represent a dramatic...

"Powell, Mylenko, Miller, and Majnoni analyze how data in public credit registries can be used both to strengthen bank supervision and to improve the quality of credit analysis by financial institutions. Empirical tests using public credit registry (PCR) data were performed in collaboration with...

"Anderson, Damania, and Jackson develop a common-agency lobbying model to help understand why North America and the European Union have adopted such different policies toward genetically modified (GM) food. Their results show that when firms (in this case farmers) lobby policymakers to influence...