The Philippines is one of the most natural hazard-prone countries in the world. Disasters in the country can quickly roll back hard-won economic and social development gains. To better safeguard the country against these disasters, it is critical to ramp up the institutional capacity and...

"Political economy explanations for fiscal profligacy are dominated by models of bargaining among organized interest groups over group-specific targeted benefits financed by generalized taxation. These models predict that governments consisting of a coalition of political parties spend more than...

"The fact that raising taxes can increase taxed labor supply through income effects is frequently used to justify much lower measures of the marginal welfare cost of taxes and greater public good provision than indicated by traditional, compensated analyses. The authors confirm that this...

High labor tax wedges and slow formal employment growth have combined to make labor tax reform an important economic policy issue in Turkey. This synthesis report presents the results of a series of empirical studies of the impact of a labor tax reform. The analysis was undertaken before the...

This publication discusses the challenges faced in accelerating access to improved water and sanitation services beyond the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets. It examines the private sector provision of piped water services and on-site sanitation services in rural areas and small towns,...

"Although early attempts at land titling in Africa were often unsuccessful, the need to secure rights in view of increased demand for land, options for registration of a continuum of individual or communal rights under new laws, and the scope for reducing costs by combining information...

"This paper investigates how China's saving, investment, and saving-investment balance will evolve in the decades ahead. Household saving in China is relatively high compared with OECD countries. However, much of China's high economywide saving, and the difference between China and other...