There is frequent public and media concern over the cost of bloated cabinets in many Sub-Saharan African countries. Scholarship on elite clientelism links cabinet positions with corruption and practices that undermine sound policy making. This paper presents new data on the number of ministers...

Trends in the size of U.S. government are examined. In the postwar period, general government primary spending rose by 1⁄4 percent of GDP a year through 1975, stabilizing thereafter. With higher social transfers offset by a lower burden of defense spending, expansion reflected a baby-boom...

The authors examine the role of governance-measured by level of corruption and quality of bureaucracy-and ask how it affects the relationship between public spending and outcomes. Their main innovation is to see if differences in efficacy of public spending can be explained by quality of...

How can the impact of aid be estimated in the presence of fungibility? And how far does fungibility reduce its benefits? These questions are analyzed in a context where a donor wants to target its efforts on a specific sector and specific geographic areas. A traditional...

In December 1999, the Boards of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund approved a new approach to their relations with low-income countries. The approach was centered around the development and implementation of Poverty Reduction Strategies (PRS), which are intended to be...

There is relatively little systematic evidence on the links between procurement systems and outcomes such as competition and corruption levels. This paper adds to the evidence base, using data on almost 34,000 firms from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys, in 88 countries that also have...

This paper examines historically the World Bank's twin features: lending to developing economies to achieve tangible results and advocating specific development policies. Section 1 provides some conceptual underpinnings for the view that an effective state is essential for development. It asks...

A frontier challenge for development strategy is to move beyond prescribing optimal economic policies, and instead -- taking a broad view of the interactions between economic, political and social constraints and dynamics -- to identify entry points capable of breaking a low-growth logjam, and...

This paper examines the effects of IMF financial assistance on economic governance in developing countries, based on panel data analyses of perceived governance indicators. It uses a two-stage approach to address possible endogeneity issues. The results show that successful implementation of IMF...

Private investment is the principal transmission channel through which fiscal policy affects growth in high-income countries. In low-income countries, governance and also other considerations suggest that the primary channel is factor productivity. Empirical results reported in this paper...