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...

A core insight from early behavioral economics is that much of human judgment and behavior is influenced by "fast thinking" that is intuitive, associative, and automatic; very little human thinking resembles the rational thinking that characterizes homo economicus. What is less well-recognized is...

The Atlas of Sustainable Development Goals 2018 is a visual guide to the trends, challenges and measurement issues related to each of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The Atlas features maps and data visualizations, primarily drawn from World Development Indicators (WDI) - the World Bank's...

Robert B. Zoellick, President of the World Bank Group, charged that economics, and in particular development economics, must broaden the scope of the questions it asks - thereby also becoming more relevant to today's complex, multi-faceted problems. He discussed the following topics: (i) from...

The newly adopted post-2015 development agenda is centered on 17 sustainable development goals to be reached by 2030. This volume of the World Bank Legal Review looks at how law and justice systems can support the financing and implementation of these goals, including the role of the rule of law...

Public spending plays a key role in the economic growth and development of most developing economies. This book analyzes revenues, policy, and administration of Domestic Resource Mobilization (DRM) in developing countries. It provides a broad landscape of practical examples, drawing from lessons...

Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- About the data -- Introduction -- The world by income, FY2017 -- The world by region -- Sustainable development goals -- 1. No poverty -- 2. Zero hunger -- 3. Good health and well-being -- 4. Quality education -- 5. Gender equality -- 6. Clean water and sanitation...

Social norms affect almost every aspect of people's lives, and can be an obstacle to or support economic development. This paper outlines what social norms are and how they work, providing examples from everyday life and from development case studies. Sometimes not much can be done about...

The rapid growth of trust funds at multilateral development organizations has been widely neglected in the academic literature so far. Using a simple illustrative model, this paper examines the choice by sovereign donors among various trust fund options. The authors contend that the choice among...