This paper surveys the literature to document the main stylized facts, risks, and policy challenges related to the expansion of global nonfinancial corporate debt after the 2008-09 global financial crisis. Nonfinancial corporate debt steadily increased after the crisis, especially in emerging...

The formation of health professionals is critical for the health system to function and to achieve its universal health coverage (UHC) goals, and this is well recognized by the majority of governments that plan to ensure enough training places and aim to regulate in order to ensure quality. But...

The subject of which firms are the key employers-and which of these create or destroy jobs at a faster rate-is eminently important for academics and policy makers. The relative importance of small versus large firms and old versus young firms has in particular been extensively debated and...

Since we introduced the term "middle-income trap" in 2006, it has become popular among policy makers and researchers. In May 2015, a search of Google Scholar returned more than 3,000 articles including the term and about 300 articles with the term in the title. This paper provides a...

Sri Lanka is increasingly seeking to ensure that its public school system not only delivers greater shares of students who have completed higher secondary and tertiary education, but also that all students obtain a much better education. Raising teacher effectiveness is considered as crucial for...

Building on earlier work by political philosophers, economists have recently sought to define a concept of equity that accommodates the fairness of reward to individual responsibility and effort, while allowing for the existence of some inequalities which are unfair and should be compensated....

Pakistan has made strides over the last decade in its Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) response, with active surveillance, considerable research, both governmental and non?governmental prevention and care activities, and treatment since 2005 to 2006. However, the Human Immunodeficiency...

This paper explores how the private sector can positively contribute to peace-building and conflict prevention, and how that positive private sector role can be supported and enhanced. The starting premise recognizes that the private sector exists in all conflict situations and has the potential...

The processing of numerical information is a dominant feature of everyday life. Whether it is in the context of financial transactions, such as shopping for groceries or in gauging how many people are in a room, we are constantly using numerical information to guide our behavior and make...

In the past two years alone, at least six systematic reviews or meta-analyses have examined the interventions that improve learning outcomes in low- and middle-income countries. However, these reviews have sometimes reached starkly different conclusions: reviews, in turn, recommend information...