The World Bank Group promotes small and medium enterprise (SME) growth through both systemic and targeted interventions. Targeting means focusing benefits on one size-class of firms to the exclusion of others. Targeted support for SMEs is a big business for the World Bank Group, averaging around...

Fragile and conflict-affected states (FCS) have become an important focus of World Bank Group assistance in recent years as recognition of the linkages between fragility, conflict, violence, and poverty has grown. Addressing issues of recurring conflict and political violence and helping build...

Too Global to Fail: The World Bank at the Intersection of National and Global Public Policy in 2025 analyzes the issue of global public goods, particularly those related to the environment, in the context of the global development process. Long-term sustainability of development is at stake, as...

The unanticipated spike in international food prices in 2007-08 hit many developing countries hard. International prices for food and other agricultural products increased by more than 100 percent between early 2007 and mid-2008. Prices for food cereals more than doubled; and those for rice...

Development economics and policy are due for a redesign. In the past few decades, research from across the natural and social sciences has provided stunning insight into the way people think and make decisions. Whereas the first generation of development policy was based on the assumption that...

Cover Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Foreword -- Preface -- Contributors -- PART I | INTRODUCTION -- 1 | The Growing Importance of Frontier and Developing Asia -- 2 | Lessons for Frontier Economies from the Recent Experience of Emerging Markets -- PART II | TRANSFORMING...

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Contents -- Abbreviations -- Acknowledgments -- Overview -- Management Response -- Management Action Record -- Chairperson's Summary -- 1 Introduction -- Relative Intensity of Knowledge Services in World Bank Country Programs -- Objectives, Scope, and...

Global growth is expected to be 2.8 percent in 2015, but is expected to pick up to 3.2 percent in 2016-17. Growth in developing countries and some high-income countries is set to disappoint again this year. The prospect of rising borrowing costs will compound the challenges many developing...

Poverty: Malaise of Development features papers from a conference held at the University of Chester exploring how poverty undermines development strategies. This volume engages with three broad thematic areas, theoretical discourses and policy implications, vulnerability and poverty and...

The revival of economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa is all the more welcome for having followed one of the worst economic disasters since the industrial revolution. Six of the world's fastest growing economies in the 2000s were African. But with the exception of Ethiopia and Rwanda, the growth...