The author studies the impact of political decentralization on childhood immunization, an essential public service provided in almost all countries. He examines the relationship empirically using a time-series data set of 140 low- and middle-income countries from 1980 to 1997. The author finds...

Indonesia's labor markets, especially on the island of Java, have been transformed in the past 30 years, especially since liberalization picked up speed in the mid-1980's. The author explores the regional dimensions of that transformation. In some other countries, when labor markets changed,...

The previous General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) negotiations produced little liberalization of the movement of individual service providers (mode 4), and the potentially large global gains from suchmovement remain unrealized. In the current negotiations, as part of the Doha...

The World Bank is financing an increasing number of community-based social services projects. The objective of this paper is to review and categorize the extent, scope and mechanisms of these projects in the current Bank portfolio, and to identify good practices and potential pitfalls. The...

The authors analyze the relationship between financial development and inter-industry resource allocation in the short and long run. They suggest that in the long run, economies with high rates of financial development will devote relatively more resources to industries with a"natural"reliance...

The authors examine whether financial development boosts the growth of small firms more than large firms and hence provides information on the mechanisms through which financial development fosters aggregate economic growth. They define an industry's technological firm size as the firm size...

The authors rely on a series of growth accounting exercises to determine whether the growth rate of total factor productivity (TFP) or the unexplained portion of GDP growth (after controlling for the accumulation of capital per worker) in 18 Latin American and Caribbean economies has benefited...

World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World (report no. 17300) argued that institutions-the rules of the game that govern production and exchange-shape a country's prospects for sustained market-led growth. The author provides an institutional framework for service delivery, an...

Fundamentally, poverty reduction is about bringing growth processes to poor areas. Because poor areas can benefit from technical and organizational innovations made elsewhere in the world, it is possible today to create productive jobs faster and in greater quantity than ever before. The puzzle...

Trade does not stimulate growth in economies with excessive business and labor regulations. The authors examine the effect of openness on growth using cross-country regressions in both levels and changes. Results from the levels regressions imply that increased openness is associated with a...