Policy makers in both developed and developing countries want to accelerate spatial development, make cities more competitive, attract new entrepreneurs, boost economic growth, and promote job creation. These are commendable goals given that city populations in developing countries are expected...

In the developing world, poor rural women and their children spend considerable time collecting water. Do women living in areas where more time is needed for water collection tend to participate less in income-earning, market-based activities? Do the education outcomes of their children tend to...

Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) represent a large and growing pool of savings. An increasing number of these funds are owned by natural resource–exporting countries and have a variety of objectives, including intergenerational equity and macroeconomic stabilization. Traditionally, these funds...

This Economic Premise examines the intersection of four important development themes: urbanization, agglomeration, gender, and informality. Although urbanization has continued at a rapid pace, formalization appears to have stalled. Women comprise an increasing share of the informal sector in...

Although the world witnessed an unprecedented pace of poverty reduction over the last decades, reducing the number of people living in extreme poverty by more than 700 million, approximately 1.2 billion people remained entrenched in destitution in 2010. In order to leverage developing country...

Emerging market economies (EMEs) are making important strides in developing long-term finance capital market vehicles to support investment in strategic areas such as infrastructure. However, since last year, EMEs have suffered from big shifts in terms of market sentiment. While EMEs’...

The global economic crisis that broke out in 2008 has reawakened interest in fiscal policy. In the early stages of the crisis, there was a widespread turn to countercyclical fiscal stimulus. Furthermore, the recent euro area crisis has underlined the importance of long-term fiscal sustainability...

Can service be a growth escalator? The world is experiencing its third industrial revolution, and services are at the forefront of this revolution. Services have already surpassed industry as a source of economic growth and job creation, in both developed and developing economies. In the...

While South Asia’s average gross domestic product (GDP) growth in the past decade was only slightly lower than in East Asia and the Pacific, the region significantly lags behind in terms of infrastructure access. In some cases, South Asia’s access levels are more similar to sub-Saharan...

South Asia has one of the fastest growing economies in the world, yet it is also home to the largest concentration of people living in debilitating poverty. How do the two coexist? The paradox of South Asia is that growth has been instrumental in reducing poverty rates, but poverty rates have...