This study shows that in developing countries with no more than partly favorable policies toward manufactured exports, outside assistance to services that promote and support manufactured exports has had little discernible impact on exports and has rarely been effective in expanding them. The...

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...

Watson, Crawford, and Farley examine the ways in which science and technology (S&T) support poverty alleviation and economic development and how these themes have been given emphasis or short shrift in various areas of the World Bank's work. Central to their thesis is the now well-established...

By using better data on German foreign direct investment (FDI) than previous studies, the author found that: (i) developing countries might attract more FDI flows by easing investment restrictions or implementing incentives - but the effect of incentives could be modest and does not justify...

This paper contains abstracts of Policy Research Working Paper series, Numbers 2499-2567.

Indicative planning which involves the establishment of sectoral targets which are not compulsory for the private sector and are embedded in macroeconomic projections that pertain to a period of several years. Indicative planning has been widely practiced in developing countries during the post...

This paper is an account of the World Bank's effort to collect household-level data on poverty in developing countries and what that data says about the effects of government policies on living conditions of the poor. The main objective of the Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) surveys is...

The author gives examples of research recently published in professional journals that directly helped, or could help, in formulating policy advice (and perhaps even policymaking). An article by Younger (1992) was helpful in analyzing a problem in Ghana, where aid flows to government crowded out...

The explosion of informal entrepreneurial activity during Mongolia's transition to a market economy represents one of the most visible signs of change in this expansive but sparsely populated Asian country. To deepen our understanding of Mongolia's informal sector during the transition, the...

This paper contains abstracts of Policy Research working paper series, numbers 2803 - 2856.