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...

This paper uses a combination of survey questions to instructors and data collected from course syllabi and examinations to examine how the subject of development economics is taught at the undergraduate and masters levels in developing countries, and benchmark this against undergraduate classes...

Developing countries have urbanized rapidly since 1950. To explain urbanization, standard models emphasize rural-urban migration, focusing on rural push factors (agricultural modernization and rural poverty) and urban pull factors (industrialization and urban-biased policies). Using new...

The international development community has been grappling with the challenges of implementing development programs and, consequently, with the design of practical approaches to attaining program objectives. This paper contributes to the emerging discussion on addressing the implementation...

The need to construct an effective strategy for industrial development in low-income countries has been largely ignored by development economists because industrial policies have failed in many developing countries. This does not imply, however, that industrial development cannot be promoted....

Prevailing economic ideas -- and fashions -- about development have influenced the International Development Association (IDA) since its creation in 1960. The creation of the organization itself is the result of two contemporaneous facts: an urgent need to channel development finance to...

Firms in developing countries face numerous and serious constraints on their growth, ranging from corruption to lack of infrastructure to inability to access finance. Countries lack the resources to remove all the constraints at once and so would be better off removing the most binding one...

This paper reviews the literature on tax assignment in decentralized countries. Ideally, own-source revenues should be sufficient to enable at least the richest subnational governments to finance from their own resources all locally-provided services that primarily benefit local residents....

Although there has been research looking at the relationship between the structure of the financial system and economic growth, much less work has dealt with the importance of bank-based versus market-based financial systems for poverty and income distribution. Empirical evidence has indicated...

Governments play a very important role in supporting innovation, managing the disruptive effects of innovation, and ensuring that the benefits of innovation are broadly shared in the long run. This paper reviews the literature on market mechanisms that translate innovation into jobs and policies...