What major insights have emerged from development economics in the past decade, and how do they matter for the World Bank? This challenging question was recently posed by World Bank Group President David Malpass to the staff of the Development Research Group. This paper assembles a set of 13...

This paper describes the methodology for a new World Bank Human Capital Index (HCI). The HCI combines indicators of health and education into a measure of the human capital that a child born today can expect to obtain by her 18th birthday, given the risks of poor education and health that...

This paper estimates the effect of government investment on private investment in a sample of 39 low-income countries. Fluctuations in a predetermined component of disbursements on loans from official creditors to developing country governments are used as an instrument for fluctuations in...

This paper uses a large cross-country dataset to empirically examine factors associated with sovereign defaults on external private creditors and expropriation of foreign direct investments in developing countries since the 1970s. In the long run, sovereign defaults and expropriations are likely...

Unbundling power generation, transmission, and distribution is not an end itself, but rather a means to achieve better performance. The key objective of the analytical framework of this paper is to explore the links between alternative market structures and performance (in terms of access,...

This paper presents new global evidence on the key determinants of public-private partnership investment in electricity generated by renewable energy based on a panel data analysis for 105 developing countries over a period of 16 years from 1993 to 2008. It aims to identify the key factors...

This paper presents new global evidence on the key determinants of public-private partnership investment in electricity transmission and distribution, based on a panel data analysis of 105 developing countries over a period of 16 years from 1993 to 2008. It aims to identify the key factors...

This paper presents new global evidence on the key determinants of public-private partnership investment in electricity generated by fossil fuels and renewable energy based on a panel data analysis for 105 developing countries over a period of 16 years from 1993 to 2008. It aims to identify the...

This paper uses a novel loan-level dataset covering lending by official creditors to developing country governments to construct an instrument for public spending that can be used to estimate government spending multipliers. Loans from official creditors (primarily multilateral development banks...

The authors use data from more than 6,000 World Bank projects evaluated between 1983 and 2009 to investigate macro and micro correlates of project outcomes. They find that country-level "macro" measures of the quality of policies and institutions are very strongly correlated with project...