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...

Serbia spends relatively large amounts on state aid programs, many of which will have to be phased out or restructured to comply with EU laws. There is room to restructure the existing programs to target activities that have more growth and job dividends; for example, by targeting startups and...

This paper examines the correlates of success of development policy lending operations of the World Bank between 2004 and 2012. The paper uses a data set constructed of individual loan characteristics and ex-post loan ratings produced by the World Bank's Independent Evaluation Group. Departing...

This mixed methods study investigates why fewer than one in five impact evaluations integrates a value-for-money analysis of the development intervention being evaluated. This study distills four main insights from combined analysis of 33 semi-structured and unstructured interviews, surveys of...

This study investigates the World Bank's use of lending and non-lending instruments to affect the policy priorities of developing countries. In a typical year, the World Bank lends more than USD 30 billion to its client countries. It also spends approximately USD 200 million on the provision of...

This paper shows that the increased policy-selectivity of aid allocations observed in recent years provides recipient countries an incentive to improve policies. The paper estimates that a change in the World Banks Country Policy and Institutional Assessment policy index from 1.5 to 2 for a...

In Madagascar, donors have traditionally counted for almost half of the government's budget and have been, by far, the main source of funding in social sectors. Since the beginning of the crisis, official aid toward education, health, and social protection surged, reaching almost US

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the 2009 global recession. Most emerging market and developing economies weathered the global recession relatively well. However, following a short-lived initial rebound in activity in 2010, the global economy and, especially, emerging market and...

"Informality" is a term used to describe the collection of firms, workers, and activities that operate outside the legal and regulatory systems. It is widespread in the majority of developing countries-in a typical developing economy, the informal sector produces about 35 percent of gross...