The global extreme poverty rate has fallen by half since 1990, but progress within the developing world has been uneven. Extreme poverty remains widespread in most low-income countries while many middle-income countries also continue to have substantial levels with many people there who have...

At the end of 2011, the Indian power sector found itself in financial crisis, just a decade after the 2001 bailout of state electricity boards (SEBs) by the central government. Bankrupt state power distribution utilities in several states were unable to pay their bills or repay their debts....

The International Comparison Program (ICP) is a large and highly complex worldwide statistical program conducted under the charter of the United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC). The ICP is designed to provide globally comparable economic aggregates in national accounts that can be used by...

Twelve years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, domestic and international analysts of the transition economies by and large agree that the transition from central planning to a market economy has been exceedingly difficult. There has also been a major debate about the extent to which the...

The purpose of the paper is to present a more granular view of such projects through the in-depth focus on a limited number of case studies, with a view to understanding what factors in the design of such lending have helped achieve objectives of expanded access, and what forms of interventions...