Is generalized debt relief an effective development strategy, or should assistance be tailored to countries' characteristics? To answer this question, the authors build a simple model in which recipient governments reveal their creditworthiness if donors offer them to choose between aid and debt...

There is relatively little systematic evidence on the links between procurement systems and outcomes such as competition and corruption levels. This paper adds to the evidence base, using data on almost 34,000 firms from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys, in 88 countries that also have...

Recent global initiatives on debt relief and development assistance call for increasing aid for trade to the poorest countries. The paper applies a multi-country computable general equilibrium model to measure the effectiveness of alternative aid for trade categories. The findings show that aid...

The authors use preliminary results from an ongoing effort to construct estimates of debt relief to study its allocation across a sample of 62 low-income countries. They find some evidence that debt relief, particularly from multilateral creditors, has been allocated to countries with better...

This paper assesses the extent to which debt overhang poses a constraint to economic activity in Emerging Europe, as the region emerges from the recent financial and economic crisis. At the macroeconomic level, it finds that the external imbalance problem for Emerging Europe has been in most...

Debt vulnerabilities in low-income countries have increased substantially in recent years. Since 2013, median government debt has risen by about 20 percentage points of gross domestic product and increasingly comes from non-concessional and private sources. As a result, in most low-income...

This paper introduces a new data set on the stock and structure of domestic debt in 36 low-income countries over the period 1971-2011. It characterizes the recent trends regarding the do-mestic public debt of low-income countries and explores the relevance of different arguments put forward on...

The magnitude of the public liabilities incurred as a result of the unprecedented government action in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008-2009, and the consequences of exiting from the projected high debt scenario, have become a major source of concern about a future sovereign debt crisis....

A revenue-neutral switch from trade taxes to domestic consumption taxes is fraught with implementation challenges in countries with a large informal sector. It is shown for a sample of low-income countries over 25 years that they have had a mixed record of offsetting reductions in trade tax...

This paper reviews the published work on the governance of regulatory authorities in order to identify the basic governance standards that apply and some of the factors that affect the implementation of good governance. There are four pillars of good regulatory governance: independence,...