This paper, based on a recent OED review of World Bank social fund projects, presents findings relating to two aspects of social fund performance that have been relatively under-researched in the social funds literature-the sustainability of benefits and the institutional development impacts. On...

Since 1987 the Bank's operational guidelines have required President's Reports supporting structural adjustment loans (SALs) to pay particular attention to an analysis of the short term impact of the adjustment program on the poor and to measures proposed to alleviate negative effects. The...

This is the sixth Annual Review of Development Effectiveness (ARDE), covering the year 2002. its findings indicate that the Bank's country, sector, and global programs are consistent with the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) themes, increasingly focused on poverty reduction. The review...

Social funds have been one of the main manifestations of the World Bank's move toward promoting projects with a participatory orientation. Supporters of social funds argue that participation in social fund activities builds community social capital. Critics of the Bank's use of social capital...

Is development best achieved by going for growth, or does specific attention need to be paid to directly improving human welfare? In contrast to the Human Development Reports of the UNDP, the World Bank has stressed the growth approach. Recent work has reinforced this position by arguing that...

Why do people participate in community projects? Game theory approaches based on the prisoners' dilemma suggest that people will not participate even if they would have been better off had they all done so. This paper adapts an argument of Bates to show how a system of enforceable fines can...

The Community-Based Nutrition Component of the Bangladesh Integrated Nutrition Project sought to improve nutritional status through nutritional counselling and supplementary feeding for malnourished children and pregnant women. This paper presents a theory-based impact evaluation of this...

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Poverty is now commonly recognised as a multi-dimensional concept, but there is less agreement about whether such recognition matters for poverty reduction policies in practice. This article argues that it does matter, as income is an input measure rather than a welfare outcome, the correlation...