The authors review world experience with creating transitional jobs through public work relief, public service employment, and subsidized private employment. They argue that work relief is a critical component of any structural adjustment program, so long as the work relief projects are...

Pensions are retirement income. They offer protection in case you live long enough to quit collecting a paycheck and can stop working. In the United States, pensions are provided by both public and private sectors. Private sector pension funds are the largest formal financial institution for...

This paper reviews the experience in transacting payments through the commercial banking system, to beneficiaries in Colombia's"Familias en Accion"program. The story told will be useful to those trying to solve the operational problem of moving cash, cost-effectively to large numbers of...

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...

In this exploration of urban and regional dynamics in Poland after the transition, the authors find that the degree of urbanization, and primacy remains low in Poland. The largest cities are not growing at the rate that would be expected if post-transition adjustments were operating freely. As a...

The authors examine the impact of bank supervision on the financing obstacles faced by almost 5,000 corporations across 49 countries. They find that firms in countries with strong official supervisory agencies that directly monitor banks tend to face greater financing obstacles. Moreover,...

The authors analyze the role of institutions in resolving systemic banking crises for a broad sample of countries. Banking crises are fiscally costly, especially when policies like substantial liquidity support, explicit government guarantees on financial institutions’ liabilities, and...

The author analyzes decentralization reforms in the education sector in Latin America (their status, impact, and ongoing challenges) by making use of the accountability framework developed by the World Development Report 2004: Making Services Work for Poor People. She starts by identifying three...

The purpose of this paper is to briefly develop the following points: (1) The argument that the size of the public sector needs to be drastically reduced has probably been taken too far, without really analyzing the full consequences of the shift. Often the dismantling of some functions implies...

One unintended consequence of Russia's transition to a market economy has been a massive out-migration from the Northern periphery. The major causes of this out-migration have been price liberalization which make the cost of fuel, food, and other consumer goods in the North more expensive; the...