The World Bank is uniquely positioned to identify and disseminate innovative development practices. Based on his thirty-year experience as a World Bank staff member, the author takes an institutional perspective on the innovation climate at the World Bank

Donors of foreign aid increasingly claim to consider gender inequality in the recipient countries to be a serious concern. While aid specifically to promote gender equality receives only a tiny share of aid budgets, allocations to education, health, and c

This paper considers the impact of sea level rise and storm surge on the Red River delta region of Vietnam an area already known to be highly vulnerable to coastal risks. By combining a range of sea level rise scenarios for 2050 with the simulated storm s

This paper explores the relationship between microcredit and poverty reduction. To investigate this question, we posit a bare-bone, household model that outlines the economic environment within which various types of family microenterprises operate. It hi

After the Second World War, Mozambique went through a series of transformations, from an incipient industrializing colonial society to an independent country with a central planned economy, plus a regional and internal war, and finally from 1994 onwards,

Climate variability poses a major risk to agricultural incomes in Africa. In Ghana, most of the country.s poor people live in the north and households find it difficult to hold back their productive assets during the lean season. This study investigates t

Ethiopia is powering ahead with an ambitious energy development strategy, highly reliant on abundant hydropower potential. A changing climate, including uncertain water supply, however, may pose a salient challenge to meeting expected targets. Bridging the modeling gaps between climate, energy,...

This article examines the relationship between women.s economic and social empowerment in the context of extreme poverty. It is based on the findings of primary fieldwork on the char islands of north-west Bangladesh, investigating the processes resulting from the implementation of the Chars...

This paper examines the impact of foreign aid on economic growth in Sierra Leone, a country where an empirical econometric study on aid effectiveness is yet to exist. Using a triangulation of approaches involving the ARDL bounds test approach and the Johansen maximum likelihood approach to...