This paper discusses the analytical foundations of international comparisons for assessing a country's potential for improvement along various dimensions of social and economic development. The paper presents the Stochastic Frontier approach and applies it to estimate feasible frontiers or...

Using an quot;event-studyquot; methodology, this paper analyzes the aftermath of civil war in a cross-section of countries. It focuses on those experiences where the end of conflict marks the beginning of a relatively lasting peace. The paper considers 41 countries involved in internal wars in...

The main purpose of this paper is to provide a critical overview of the recent empirical contributions that use cross country data to study the effect of product market regulation and reform on a country's macroeconomic performance. After a brief review of the theoretical literature and of...

The author provides a preliminary benchmarking of infrastructure performance in Lesotho in four major sectors - electricity, water and sanitation, information and communication technology, and road transportation - against the relevant group of comparator countries using a new World Bank...

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...

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...

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...

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...