The Big Picture: Global Trends Affecting Agricultural Finance -- Institutional and Process Innovations in Serving Rural Clients -- Dealing With Risks in Agricultural Finance -- Using Modern Technology for High-Quality Services in Rural Areas

This paper investigates corruption and tax evasion and their firm-level determinants across 25,000 firms in 57 countries, a large fraction of which are small and medium enterprises in developing countries. Firms that pay more bribes also evade more taxes. Corruption acts as a tax on innovation,...

The 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness sets targets for increased use by donors of recipient country systems for managing aid. The target is premised on a view that country systems are strengthened when donors trust recipients to manage aid funds, but undermined when donors manage aid...

This paper reviews and synthesizes theoretical and empirical research on the role of finance in developing countries. First, the paper presents the stylized facts about firms in developing nations as well as the legal, financial and broader institutional framework in which these firms operate....

The availability of windfall revenues from natural resource exports or foreign aid potentially weakens governments' incentives to design efficient tax systems. Cross-country data for developing countries provide evidence for this hypothesis, using a World Bank indicator of "efficiency of revenue...

This paper documents and analyzes gender differences in the use of financial services using individual-level data from 98 developing countries. The data, drawn from the Global Financial Inclusion (Global Findex) database, highlight the existence of significant gender gaps in ownership of...

This paper analyzes the impact of donor fragmentation on the quality of government bureaucracy in aid-recipient nations. A formal model of a donor's decision to hire government administrators to manage donor-funded projects predicts that the number of administrators hired declines as the donor's...

While substantial research finds that financial development boosts overall economic growth, the authors study whether financial development is pro-poor: Does financial development disproportionately raise the income of the poor? Using a broad cross-country sample, the authors find that the...

Survey data from 120 developing countries are used to examine the relation between establishment size and age in the formal sector. Existing research suggests that manufacturing establishments in developing countries do not grow over time, most likely because of market imperfections and...