In the 1980s development assistance shifted largely from financing investments (such as roads and dams) to promoting policy reform. This change came because of a growing awareness that developing countries were held back more by poor policies than by a lack of finance for investment. After...

This paper analyses the causes of success or failure of adjustment programmes, using a new database on 220 reform programmes. We find that the success or failure of reform depends on domestic political-economy forces. A few donor-effort variables are also highly correlated with the probability...

This paper analyzes the importance of strengthening the relationship of accountability between health service providers and citizens for improving access to and quality of health care. How this is to be achieved, and whether it works, however, remain open questions. The paper presents a...

Incomes in the poorest two quintiles on average increase at the same rate as overall average incomes. This is because, in a global dataset spanning 118 countries over the past four decades, changes in the share of income of the poorest quintiles are generally small and uncorrelated with changes...

Social welfare functions that assign weights to individuals based on their income levels can be used to document the relative importance of growth and inequality changes for changes in social welfare. In a large panel of industrial and developing countries over the past 40 years, most of the...

China has been the most successful developing country in this modern era of globalization. Since initiating economic reform after 1978, its economy has expanded at a steady rate over 8 percent per capita, fueling historically unprecedented poverty reduction (the poverty rate declined from over...

China has been the most rapidly growing economy in the world over the past 25 years. This growth has fueled a remarkable increase in per capita income and a decline in the poverty rate from 64 percent at the beginning of reform to 10 percent in 2004. At the same time, however, different kinds of...