This study investigates the impact of World Bank development policy lending for public sector governance on the quality of public sector management and institutions. The World Bank’s Country Policy and Institutional Assessments (CPIA) are used to measure the latter, the study considers only...

This study investigates the World Bank's use of lending and non-lending instruments to affect the policy priorities of developing countries. In a typical year, the World Bank lends more than $30 billion to its client countries. It also spends approximately $200 million on the provision of...

This paper analyzes the factors that affect countries’ graduation from International Development Association (IDA) assistance and develops a statistical model of graduation. IDA provides concessional financing (credits, grants, and guarantees) to the world’s poorest countries to help reduce...

This paper shows that the increased policy-selectivity of aid allocations observed in recent years provides recipient countries an incentive to improve policies. The paper estimates that a change in the World Banks Country Policy and Institutional Assessment policy index from 1.5 to 2 for a...

Seminal arguments in political economy hold that citizens will more readily demand accountability from governments for taxes than for non-tax revenue from oil or aid. Two identical experiments on large, representative subject pools in Ghana and Uganda probe the effects of different revenue types...

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...

Over the past decade, donors of foreign aid quadrupled their annual contributions to trust funds at the World Bank. This earmarking of contributions to donors' preferred recipient countries and issues has raised concerns about the alignment of trust funds with the performance-based allocations...

Some multilateral agencies implement aid projects in a broad range of sectors, with aid disbursements showing a strong overlap with those of bilateral donors. The question then arises of why do bilateral donors delegate sizable shares of their aid to non-specialized agencies for implementation?...

The rapid growth of trust funds at multilateral development organizations has been widely neglected in the academic literature so far. Using a simple illustrative model, this paper examines the choice by sovereign donors among various trust fund options. The authors contend that the choice among...

This study investigates the effects of the World Bank's exogenously-determined income threshold for eligibility for concessionary International Development Association (IDA) loans on the allocations of bilateral donors. The donors might interpret the World Bank's policies and allocations across...