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...

We revisit the relevance of the World Bank's Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA)against growth performance, with attention to possible biases arising from qualitative andquantitative changes in the CPIA methodology. The CPIA, introduced in the late 1970s, had aseries of extensive...

One of the most fruitful advances in modern economics has been the introduction of psychological realism into the model of "economic man." The World Development Report 2015 organizes the evidence about how humans actually think and make decisions into a coherent framework useful for designing...

The Government of Liberia (GOL) enacted the national identification registry (NIR) act in 2011 to establish national identification in the country. The law called for the setup of a NIR to be responsible for issuing a biometric-based identification card to each citizen and resident in Liberia....

The report is organized as follows. Section two reviews the identity ecosystem in Morocco. The section discusses in detail five identification programs that seem to have complementary strengths and that can be considered as assets. These are the national identity (CNIE), the civil register, the...

Cabo Verde's economic achievements over the last thirty years have been spectacular and are unprecedented on the African continent. These achievements are remarkable given the unique challenges the country faces due to its small size, lack of scale for production of goods and delivery of...

The rapid transformation of agri-food value chains in Africa and other developing countries hasimportant implications for economic growth and poverty reduction. Policy makers increasinglyrecognize this but there is a need for a better understanding of what value chain transformationentails and...