European official development assistance to Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries increased sharply after 2011, ostensibly in support of the social, economic, and above all political changes demanded by the Arab uprisings. The subsequent turn to development policies driven by...

Community-driven reconstruction (CDR) is an approach to post-war reconstruction that gives discretion to local community councils in establishing priorities and overseeing the implementation of reconstruction and development activities. A series of methodologically exceptional studies has raised...

Prioritizing public investments requires information on relative returns that are difficult to derive from disparate evaluation studies. This paper presents a 'hybrid' approach that combines ex post evaluation data with an economy-wide model for experimenting ex ante with alternative investment...

India did not experience any food price spikes during 2007-08 when global food prices erupted. It was partly due to India's ban on exports of wheat and common rice. But the fiscal stimulus that the government provided in 2009 in the wake of G8 countries' call to avert economic recession, coupled...

Unlike existing studies, we adopt a multi-sectoral approach and consider the full range of climate projections. Biophysical damages are translated into economic costs using a dynamic economywide model. Our results for Vietnam indicate that the negative impacts on agriculture and roads are...

The World Bank's health sector projects in Timor-Leste - the Health Sector Rehabilitation and Development Project and the Second Health Sector Rehabilitation and Development Project - have been among the few successful operations it has funded in that country. This paper examines the factors...

Uganda has seen impressive economic growth and substantial poverty reductions over the past few decades. Today, official headcount poverty stands at about 20 per cent. However, recent research relying on non-monetary wealth indicators challenges official poverty statistics and suggests that...

The 'affordability' of new or expanded social protection programmes depends on more than an assessment of the fiscal costs or the poverty-reducing or developmental benefits. Diverse international organizations have shown that programmes costing less than or about 1 per cent of GDP have...

This paper discusses the channels of impact of an extractives activity on an economy by presenting a brief description supported by graphics of the different routes through which the direct economic and social impacts of these activities might be enhanced. These routes include those that often...

Competitive elections in many parts of Africa generate powerful incentives to presidential candidates (and to a lesser extent political parties) to brand themselves in ways that transcend regional or ethnic loyalties. In Malawi, Joyce Banda - President from 2012 to 2014 - sought to distinguish...