As evidence from rigorous impact evaluations grows in development, there have been more calls to complement impact evaluation analysis with cost analysis, so that policy makers can make investment decisions based on costs as well as impacts. This paper discusses important considerations for...

Sovereign wealth funds represent a large and growing pool of savings. An increasing number of these funds are owned by natural resource?exporting countries and have a variety of objectives, including intergenerational equity and macroeconomic stabilization. Traditionally, these funds have...

With urban industrialization on the scale achieved by East Asian economies looking increasingly less plausible, small economies in Africa need an alternative strategic approach to long-term growth. The purpose of this paper is to identify a growth strategy with the greatest potential for small,...

This paper outlines an extension of the Human Capital Index that addresses the specific challenges in education and health faced by countries in Europe and Central Asia. Good basic education will not be enough, as job markets today demand higher levels of human capital than in the past. As the...

As mobile phone ownership rates have risen in Africa, there is increased interest in using mobile telephony as a data collection platform. This paper draws on two pilot projects that use mobile phone interviews for data collection in Tanzania and South Sudan. The experience was largely a...

The mobile revolution has transformed the lives of Kenyans, providing not just communications but also basic financial access in the form of phone-based money transfer and storage, led by the M-PESA system introduced in 2007. Currently, 93 percent of Kenyans are mobile phone users and 73 percent...

Many households in developing countries lack formal financial histories, making it difficult for firms to extend credit, and for potential borrowers to receive it. However, many of these households have mobile phones, which generate rich data about behavior. This article shows that behavioral...

One-fifth of the world's population lives in countries affected by fragility, violence and conflict, impeding long-term economic growth. However, little is known about how firms respond to local changes in security, partly because of the difficulty of measuring firm activity in these settings....

This paper benchmarks the quality of project economic analysis in South Asia against other World Bank regions, using data on project exits between 1975 and 2015. The results show that the South Asia region performs on par with the other regions, in that the share of project documents that report...

Transport corridors to stimulate regional integration and trade have become a popular development tool. But when they fail to generate the expected wider economic benefits, they can become wasteful or unequitable investments. This paper evaluates the relative strengths and weaknesses of...