This paper outlines changes that have been made in the 2019 version of the Health Equity and Financial Protection Indicators database. On the financial protection side, the changes include an increase in the number of indicators from five to 14; revisions to several previous data points,...

The Sustainable Development Goals recently adopted by the United Nations represent an important step to identify shared global goals for development over the next two decades. Yet, the stated goals are not as straightforward and easy to interpret as they appear on the surface. Review of the...

The study aims to provide insights to policy makers in measuring the impact of trade liberalization and regional integration measures on gender employment and wages. The study incorporates gender-differentiated employment and wages for selected South Asian economies across sectors to identify...

This study uses loan-level data on syndicated lending to a large sample of developing countries between 1993 and 2017 to estimate the mobilization effects of multilateral development banks (MDBs), that is, their ability to crowd-in capital from private creditors. Controlling for a large set of...

This paper surveys the recent literature exploring the causes of urban pollution in the developing world and the implications of such pollution for a city's competitiveness. Within a system of cities, cities compete for jobs and people. Those cities that specialize in heavy industrial activity...

Rural accessibility is the only metric used in the Sustainable Development Goals to track progress toward better transport services in low- and middle-income countries. This paper estimates the rural accessibility index, defined as the proportion of the rural population who live within 2...

This paper explores the investments needed to achieve universal access to electricity in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2030, and the additional operation and maintenance costs these investments entail. It also explores the drivers of these costs, by exploring hundreds of scenarios that combine...

This paper provides an overview of research on out-of-pocket health expenditures, reviewing the various summary measures and the results of multi-country studies using these measures. The paper presents estimates for 146 countries from all World Bank income groups for all summary measures, along...

Sustainable Development Goal 16 is explicitly committed to measuring aspects of corruption over time, and the identification of robust indicators to do so is an important endeavor. This paper critically reviews the strengths and weaknesses of various objective and subjective indicators of...