The welfare of the poor turns in large measure not only on technocratic development quot;policiesquot;, but the effective delivery of key public services, core elements of which require thousands of face-to-face discretionary transactions (quot;practicesquot;) by service providers. The...

We present evidence that measures of quot;social cohesion,quot; such as income inequality and ethnic fractionalization, endogenously determine institutional quality, which in turn casually determines growth

This paper presents the initial findings from six rounds of research conducted between 2012 and 2016 on livelihoods and social change in rural Myanmar, undertaken as part of the Qualitative Social and Economic Monitoring initiative. These data provide unique insights into the ways in which broad...

Good policies are necessary but insufficient for delivering high quality public services. Building organizations capable of implementing increasingly complex policies at scale is crucial. But most developing countries lack such organizations and ? alarmingly ? most are not improving. Effective...

This note considers the most relevant literature and contends that, even if the ?middle income trap? is myth, it provides impetus for policy makers to reassess their strategies once the traditional sources of economic growth have diminished. Middle-income countries must find drivers of...

Malawi can be understood as a microcosm of institutional reform approaches in developing countries more broadly. A common feature of such approaches, whether implemented by government or donors, is reform initiatives that yield institutions that "look like" those found in higher-performing...

Many oil, mineral, and plantation crop-based economies experienced a substantial deceleration in growth following the commodity boom and bust of the 1970s and early 1980s. This article illustrates how countries dependent on point source natural resources (those extracted from a narrow geographic...

Institutional reforms in contemporary Cambodia are being undertaken in an environment characterized by pervasive legal pluralism - the not uncommon situation in which numerous, contradictory and competing sets of rules and norms regulate social, economic and political relationships. This paper...

This paper combines theory with data from different domains to provide an empirical analysis of the scale and variability of social capital as wealth. The analysis is used to argue, given what has been learned from the literature on social capital, that the welfare returns to investing in trust...

Incorporating qualitative methods into the evaluation of development programs has become increasingly popular in recent years, both for the distinctive insights such approaches can bring in their own right and because of their capacity to complement the strengths -- and where necessary correct...