The World Bank was founded to correct failures in international capital markets. That role has shifted over the past 70 years. Modern analyses should proceed from the premise that the Bank's central goal is and should be to reduce extreme poverty. We show that the vast majority of donor...

Global health aid is exceedingly complex. It encompasses more than one hundred bilateral agencies, global funds, and independent initiatives that interact with an equally complex and diverse set of institutions involved in financing and providing health care in developing countries. Numerous...

The World Bank's new Program for Results (PforR) instrument is only the third instrument approved by its Board and the first to directly link disbursements to results. Designed to support programs of service delivery, the program is still in its early stages. This paper provides an overview of...

Do we still need the World Bank, given how much the global financial sector has expanded since the institution was founded? The paper argues that there is a continuing role for the Bank and that it is complementary to private finance. But fulfilling that role calls for a significant change in...

The World Bank's new Program for Results (PforR) instrument is only the third financing instrument approved since 1944. The PforR portfolio is expanding rapidly and represents an appreciable part of “results-based” development finance. This paper analyzes the first 35 operations. They...

Past research on aid and growth is flawed because it typically examines the impact of aggregate aid on growth over a short period, usually four years, while significant portions of aid are unlikely to affect growth in such a brief time. We divide aid into three categories: (1) emergency and...

The politics, rules, and institutions of cooperation among nations have not kept up with the demands from global citizens for changes in the global political order. Whether norms and policies can make the global politics of managing the global economy more effective, more legitimate, and more...

This paper attempts a first-cut listing of global public goods and international spillover activities, as well as providing some data on their global distribution alongside basic correlational analysis. Few if any goods are “pure” global public goods and there is a spectrum of the extent of...

In recent years, a number of private foundations and organizations have launched ambitious initiatives to support promising entrepreneurs in developing countries, on both a for-profit and not-for-profit basis. Many of these programs have focused exclusively on building business capacity. While...

Development finance is at a turning point. There is talk about a “triple revolution of goals, actors and tools.” As much of Asia grows its way out of poverty, aid will increasingly be focused on Africa and on countries plagued by instability, or with governments unable to meet the basic...