Suppose that when addressing the question of ?what?s left for the WTO?,? tariff negotiators relied not on the agenda established in 2001 but instead on the terms-of-trade theory of trade agreements to identify negotiating priorities. This paper uses the lens of the terms-of-trade theory to...

Against what standards should we judge the developing world's overall performance against poverty going forward? The paper proposes two measures, each with both "optimistic" and "ambitious" targets for 2022, 10 years from the time of writing. The first measure is absolute consumption poverty, as...

This paper provides an overview of the history of development research at the World Bank and points to new future directions in both what we research and how we research. Six main messages emerge. First, research and data have long been essential elements of the Bank's country programs and its...

This paper examines the role of the public sector in providing additional information to exporters in developing countries as they seek to monitor and keep open their access to foreign markets by using the rules of the WTO system. It highlights new information generation and dissemination...

Critical appraisals of the current and potential benefits from developing country engagement in the World Trade Organization (WTO) focus mainly on the Doha Round of negotiations. This paper examines developing country participation in the WTO dispute settlement system to enforce foreign market...

We are not seeing faster progress against poverty amongst the poorest developing countries. Yet this is implied by widely accepted "stylized facts" about the development process. The paper tries to explain what is missing from those stylized facts. Consistently with models of economic growth...

While the 2008 financial crisis is global in nature, it is likely to have heterogeneous welfare impacts within the developing world, with some countries, and some people, more vulnerable than others. It also threatens to have lasting impacts for some of those affected, notably through the...

The paper presents a major overhaul to the World Bank's past estimates of global poverty, incorporating new and better data. Extreme poverty-as judged by what "poverty" means in the world's poorest countries-is found to be more pervasive than we thought. Yet the data also provide robust evidence...