What major insights have emerged from development economics in the past decade, and how do they matter for the World Bank? This challenging question was recently posed by World Bank Group President David Malpass to the staff of the Development Research Group. This paper assembles a set of 13...

This paper presents a review of studies that estimate the cost of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Although the Sustainable Development Goals provide useful benchmarks for fiscal authorities and donors, typical cross-country costing exercises can be misleading, for a variety of...

Reform leaders who want to pursue technically sound policies are confronted with the problem of getting myriad government agencies, staffed by thousands of bureaucrats and state personnel, to deliver. This paper provides a framework for thinking about the problem as a series of interdependent...

Abundant qualitative evidence reveals how public and private actors abuse regulations to seek rents, impede reforms, and distort the economy. However, empirical evidence of such behavior, including its economic costs, remains limited. For that reason, the objective of this paper is to help...

This paper uses new survey data to measure the government's capacity to deliver goods and services in a manner that includes: high coverage of the population; equal access; and high quality of service delivery. The paper finds variation in these indicators across and within Indian states....

This report is an output of the Better Regulation for Growth Program between the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and IC, the Investment Climate Advisory Services of the World Bank Group. The reports identifies a set of minimum...

How does adaptive implementation work in practice? Drawing on extensive interviews and observations, this paper contrasts the ways in which an adaptive component of a major health care project was implemented in three program and three matched comparison states in Nigeria. The paper examines the...

This paper examines the public sector wage premium using nationally representative household surveys from 91 countries. The public sector generally pays a wage premium compared to all private sector salaried employees, but the size of the premium is sensitive to the choice of the private sector...

This paper explores the determinants of public employment across the world and finds that it is negatively associated with country size (by population) and positively associated with the income level. The findings show that a country's openness to trade is positively associated with public...

Malawi can be understood as a microcosm of institutional reform approaches in developing countries more broadly. A common feature of such approaches, whether implemented by government or donors, is reform initiatives that yield institutions that "look like" those found in higher-performing...