Abundant qualitative evidence reveals how public and private actors abuse regulations to seek rents, impede reforms, and distort the economy. However, empirical evidence of such behavior, including its economic costs, remains limited. For that reason, the objective of this paper is to help...

This report applies the new World Bank integrated State-Owned Enterprises Framework (iSOEF). It covers the overall landscape of the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) portfolio, including financial performance and risk analysis, and provides an analysis based on two iSOEF modules capturing key...

This paper draws lessons from an original randomized experiment in Malawi. In order to understand why roads in relatively good condition in rural areas may not be used by buses, a minibus service was subsidized over a six-month period over a distance of 20 kilometers to serve five villages....

Starting with the hypothesis that behaviors are the critical (and often overlooked) factor in public sector performance, this paper explores the notion of how behavioral change (and thus institutional change) might be better motivated in the public sector. The basis for this study is "an...

This paper uses Zambia as a case study to assess empirically whether political interference in a low-governance environment has diminished in the past years as expected after a semi-autonomous agency model was set up ten years ago. The road sector in Zambia has experienced some significant...

Governance has been an explicit part of the Bank s developmental agenda since the latter part of the 1990s, though elements of good governance have always played a role in the institution s work on development. These ranged from project focused work on financial management and procurement to the...

Many leadership interventions in Madagascar and other countries have shown that focusing on leadership can be effective in leveraging and accelerating technical reforms in a variety of settings. Reinforcing leadership capacity is important because leaders play a critical role in prioritizing,...