Promoting shared prosperity is at the center of the new World Bank Group Strategy. To this effect, a shared prosperity index will help monitor the income growth of the bottom 40 percent of the population in every developing country. However, many developing countries exhibit substantial economic...

The great transition from farm to city is filled with economic, social, and political promise. Cities are the product of a triad of forces. This Economic Premise explores how the three forces of spatial transformation—physical infrastructure, human interactions, and public policy—come...

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...