This paper discusses past and current social policy strategies in the international aid architecture. From the 1990s, aid strategy and policy shifted to put a stronger emphasis on human development. This accelerated with the Millennium Development Goals and will continue under the Sustainable...

Global demarcations exist between development aid and foreign direct investment. Rigorous statistical analysis that contrasts the relative homogeneous and heterogeneous influences of time-series panel data allows regions in the developing world to define themselves endogenously. The results...

The mixed record on the 2015 Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets and the focus on global public goods in post-MDG debates questions the future of traditional development co-operation (official development assistance, ODA). Meanwhile, international financial crisis and fiscal retrenchment...

Most Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries have accepted, in principle at least, the 50-year-old commitment of contributing 0.7 per cent of gross national income to supporting the development of countries in the Global South. But what if all countries made a universal...

This report completes the second phase of the Operations Evaluation Department's independent evaluation of the World Bank's involvement in global programs. This Phase 2 report is based on case studies of 26 (of a total of 70) Bank-supported global programs that accounted for 90 percent of the...

The COVID-19 pandemic holds at least seven lessons for the relationship between data-driven decision making, the use of artificial intelligence, and development. These are that (1) in a global crisis, the shifting value of data creates policy pitfalls; (2) predictions of crises and how they play...

The past decades witnessed big changes in international trade with the rise of global value chains. Some countries, such as China, Poland, and Vietnam rode the tide, while other countries, many in the Africa region, faltered. This paper studies the determinants of participation in global value...