The World Bank's health sector projects in Timor-Leste - the Health Sector Rehabilitation and Development Project and the Second Health Sector Rehabilitation and Development Project - have been among the few successful operations it has funded in that country. This paper examines the factors...

Discontent with the substantial influence of major global players in International Financial Institutions (IFIs) has raised a call to restructure these organizations. Greater involvement of borrowing members in lending decisions has been proposed in order to limit the exposure of development...

The regional allocation of aid within recipient countries has been largely ignored in the aid allocation literature. We use geocoded data on the location of aid projects financed by the World Bank and the African Development Bank within a sample of 27 recipient countries to assess the claim of...

This survey of the 2016 replenishments of three multilateral development bank soft funds and of the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria shows that a significant re-set of the multilateral development finance system is taking place, with grant funding from traditional donors generally in decline...

In 2016, the World Bank formally implemented a massive reform of the guidance it applies to procurements conducted under World Bank-financed projects. Because of the prominent role that the World Bank plays in shaping procurement policy, the Bank’s procurement reforms have had a profound...

This paper reviews the extraordinary reduction of poverty in China over the past 40 years. It records the key economic and poverty-specific reforms that fueled the rapid growth that enabled more than 800 million people to exit extreme poverty and documents a chronology increasingly targeted...

'The World Bank and Governance' delves into the bowels of the World Bank, exploring its organisational structure, professional culture and bureaucratic procedures, illustrating how these shape its engagement with an increasingly complex, diverse and challenging operational environment