"Climate scientists have identified global warming as the most important environmental issue of our time, but it has taken over 20 years for the problem to penetrate the public discourse in even the most superficial manner. While some nations have done better than others, no nation has...

"A variety of theories of skill formation suggest that investments in schooling and other dimensions of human capital will have lower returns if children do not have adequate levels of cognitive and social skills at an early age. This paper analyzes the impact of a randomized cash transfer...

The report focuses on preschool, as an effective early childhood development (ECD) intervention, especially for improving the status of the poorest groups in Brazil's population. Because of data limitations, the focus is primarily on pre-schooling, with some discussions on day care, and other...

"Recent changes in information and communication technologies have contributed to a dramatic increase in the degree of integration and interdependency of countries, markets, and people. Against this background, one aspect of particular concern for small states is the international movement of...

"A range of alternative empirical definitions of informal activity have been employed in the literature. Choice of definition is often dictated by data availability. Different definitions may imply very different conceptual understandings of informality. In this paper the authors investigate the...

"Recent literature and new data help determine plausible bounds to some key demographic differences between the poor and non-poor in the developing world. The author estimates that selective mortality-whereby poorer people tend to have higher death rates-accounts for 10-30 percent of the...

"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,...