An expanding body of literature has shown that better management practices can offer significant boosts to firms' productivity; this research illustrates that firms in South America are no exception. Using recent Enterprise Survey data from seven countries in South America (Argentina, Bolivia,...

Despite the popularity of business training among policy makers, the use of business training has faced increasing skepticism. This is, in part, fueled by the fact that most of the first wave of randomized experiments in developing countries could not detect statistically significant impacts of...

This paper analyzes the effects of a multilateral debt relief program on child health. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank launched the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative in the late 1990s to reduce the debt burdens of poor countries, and explicitly linked the initiative...

There is a growing effort in the non-market valuation literature toward better understanding of the stability and evolution of preferences over time. The study uses a novel approach combining a repeated choice experiment with a randomized controlled trial on stove adoption in Ethiopia to analyze...

Top-down economic models, such as computable general equilibrium models, are the common tools to assess the economic impacts of climate change policies. However, these models are incapable of representing the detailed technological characteristics of the sources of greenhouse gas emissions. The...

This study surveys one of the critical welfare aspects of contemplating climate policies in developing countries and their potential effect on workers and labor markets. The existing body of evidence finds that climate policies will likely cause a significant reduction of jobs in fossil-fuel...

To what degree can vulnerability to extreme weather events be mitigated by access to a rural livelihoods program, particularly with regard to the impacts on women? This paper addresses this question through a natural experiment arising from two independent but overlapping sources of variation:...

The country has an area of 18,000 km spread over 332 islands, of which about 110 are inhabited. Most of the population lives on two large islands, Viti Levu and Vanua Levu. Fiji faces significant development challenges, and the government has set ambitious development objectives to address them....

Jim Yong Kim, President of the World Bank Group, discussed the need to tackle climate change. What we need to do now is build unprecedented political action to fulfill the promises. He mentioned that climate volatility in places like the Sahel in Africa contribute to instability and fragility....