Vouchers stimulate demand for health care services by giving beneficiaries purchasing power. In turn, health facilities? claims are reimbursed for providing beneficiaries with improved quality of health care. Efficient strategies to generate demand from new, often poor, users and supply in the...

Over the past two decades, community-based approaches to project delivery have become a popular means for governments and development agencies to improve the alignment of projects with the needs of rural communities and increase the participation of villagers in project design and...

The burst of the Japanese financial bubble in the early 1990s has increased the bad debts of Japan's financial institutions. Japan accounts for about 20 percent of foreign aid to developing countries and for 10 percent of their exports, so Japan's economic health is important. The authors...

After the tsunami in Aceh, Indonesia, the recovery of fishing was limited while non-fishing sectors temporarily expanded. This paper shows that fishermen's ex-post labor supply responses continued to be constrained by the provision of low quality production assets. The average fishing...

Using newly collected survey data on direct supplier-multinational linkages in Chile, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland, and Vietnam, this paper first evaluates whether foreign investors differ from domestic producers in terms of their potential to generate positive spillovers for...

Fragile and conflict-affected states face daunting challenges for development. Aid has a greater importance on development in these states than in others, and therefore aid effectiveness ?management and delivery of aid ? bears serious consideration. Despite its significance, aid effectiveness is...

This paper is designed to help both the beneficiary governments and donors of aid-for-trade identify countries that are under-performing in trade and which are receiving less aid for trade than their global performance might otherwise suggest is necessary. The authors develop ten measures of...

Aid is good for the poor. This paper uses detailed aid data spanning 60 developing countries over the past two decades to show that social aid significantly and directly benefits the poorest in society, while economic aid increases the income of the poor through growth. This new and unequivocal...

This paper examines the theory of Dutch disease and its implications for practical policy questions. Dutch disease is a term that is well-known to economists and development practitioners. But it is also a concept that is often conflated with "resource curse" and misinterpreted as a "disease"...

An abundance of natural resources is both an opportunity and a challenge for developing countries. Several resource-rich, low-income countries receive amounts of foreign aid that are similar to or larger than their actual or potential revenues from natural resources. In such countries, the...