Jim Yong Kim, President of the World Bank Group, spoke about the forces in the world that are making us fundamentally rethink the approach to development at the World Bank Group. He described three paths. The first path is to accelerate inclusive and sustainable economic growth, by laying the...

The paper investigates the effects of short-term political motivations on the effectiveness of foreign aid. Specifically, the paper tests whether the effect of aid on economic growth is reduced by the share of years a country served on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in the period the...

Robert B. Zoellick, President of the World Bank Group, discussed these topics: a new, more globalized world; global aid architecture; the World Bank and a new multilateralism; and Russia's role in development. One of the strategic challenges for the World Bank Group is to contribute to the m...

Output-Based Aid (OBA) and other results-based financing mechanisms are gaining popularity in the development context for many reasons, in particular, the desire to link scarce public funding with actual results on the ground. But withholding disbursements until the delivery of 'results' or...

This paper investigates the impact of World Bank development policy operations on the quality of economic policy during the period 1998-2015. A new theoretical framework distinguishes among three effects that have been conflated hitherto: (a) marginal impacts of additional policy actions within...

This paper compiles project-level data from the World Bank's lending history to describe patterns and the composition of its portfolio. The paper focuses particularly on the effect of countries' transition from International Development Association to International Bank for Reconstruction and...

The role of 'first movers' in fragile states is critical: they grow and diversify markets in ways that no other firms do, generating disproportionate impact in terms of development and stability. But pioneer firms are rare in fragile states. This study documents their profile, their challenges,...

Progress in child mortality reduction and education attainment varies widely among oil-rich countries. This paper investigates the causes of this variation using an empirical model that departs from the available literature in allowing for explicit measurement of the impact of initial levels of...