In the highly centralized system of the Philippines, local funding provides the only source of flexibility to meet specific and urgent needs. The government in Manila, which pays all teacher salaries, finds it easier politically in times of fiscal belt-tightening to cut recurrent costs. Although...

The objective of this paper is to review the historical experience of the Bank's lending and sector activities in the population field, and to evaluate the Bank's strengths and weaknesses in this field. Based on analysis of Bank documents, interviews and field visits, the review concludes that...

Past studies have identified nutrition exclusively with nutrient intake. A better definition of nutrition would critically affect the link between poverty and malnutrition and would affect the implications for policies designed to improve the nutritional status of the poor. This paper focuses on...

This report is an attempt to develop a method for projecting mortality trends in all countries into the future, both over the short term (for one or two decades) and over the long term (for one or two centuries). Two indicators are the focus of this exercise: life expectancy at birth and the...

Hungary is entering the fourth year of a multi-pillar pension reform that has proved popular among workers despite initially lukewarm support from the government that succeeded the reforming government, and despite the poor initial performance of capital markets because of Russia's crisis in...

The authors examine how domestic violence may be used as a bargaining instrument, to extract larger dowries from a spouse's family. The phrase"dowry violence"refers not to the paid at the time of the wedding, but to additional payments demanded by the groom's family after the marriage. The...

The authors investigate the impact of labor market regulations in settings where compliance is incomplete. They review some stylized facts about labor market behavior, present an analytical model that may explain such behavior, and provide a checklist for assessing the distortionary impact of a...

The author addresses three questions about military spending in developing countries: What are the levels of (and trends in) military spending as a percentage of gross national product? What impact does peacetime military spending have on growth, government spending on social welfare and...

Although research shows that Nepalese parents prefer sending girls to schools with female teachers, only 12.8 percent of Nepalese primary school teachers are women. Nepal has among the lowest enrollment and retention rates for girls in the world. One strategy to correct the situation is to...

A long tradition sees the small firm sector as a holding pattern for workers queuing for jobs in the formal sector of a segmented labor market. An alternative"entrepreneurial"view suggests that many workers prefer self-employment to salaried jobs. These competing views can be resolved if the...