Reaching agreement on a reasonable performance target is a challenge, with costs associated with getting it wrong. Attention in the literature has focused on the potential negative effects of gaming or of creaming. However, even if there is no gaming or creaming taking place, there can still be...

To benchmark is to compare performance against a standard. As part of an effort to improve the effectiveness of monitoring and evaluation (M&E) in the policy cycle, benchmarking can be useful in three ways. First, benchmarking can help place an outcome in the next context. Was the achievement...

Since the early 1980s, export subsidies have been proposed as a way to counteract the adverse effects of an exchange rate overvaluation among member countries of the West African Monetary Union. It was felt that one way to alter the relative price of traded to nontraded goods was to attempt to...

Reaching agreement on a reasonable performance target is a challenge, with costs associated with getting it wrong. Attention in the literature has focused on the potential negative effects of gaming or of creaming. However, even if there is no gaming or creaming taking place, there can still be...

This book argues that Peru faces an unprecedented opportunity to become the next success story in Latin America. In the coming five years, policy making could put the country on a development path similar to the one that, say, Chile, Costa Rica, or Spain have followed over the last two decades....

Understanding Changes in Poverty brings together different methods to decompose the contributions to poverty reduction. A simple approach quantifies the contribution of changes in demographics, employment, earnings, public transfers, and remittances to poverty reduction. A more complex approach...