This paper explains the ideas and approaches that underpin the World Bank's Justice for the Poor (J4P) program. J4P is an approach to legal empowerment that focuses on mainstreaming sociolegal concerns into development processes, in sectors ranging from community-driven development and mining...

The consensus among scholars and policymakers that 'institutions matter' for development has led inexorably to a conclusion that 'history matters' since institutions clearly form and evolve over time. Unfortunately, however, the next logical step has not yet been taken, which is to recognise...

This overview essay on policy responses to global poverty and inequality over the last ten years is structured around four themes. First, drawing on the most recent empirical data, it provides some stylized facts on recent trends in poverty and inequality in developing countries. Second, it...

This article introduces and explores issues regarding the question of what constitute valid forms of development knowledge, focusing in particular on the relationship between fictional writing on development and more formal academic and policy-oriented representations about development issues....

Understanding the efficacy of development projects requires not only a plausible counter factual, but an appropriate match between the shape of impact trajectory over time and the deployment of a corresponding array of research tools capable of empirically discerning such a trajectory. At...

What major insights have emerged from development economics in the past decade, and how do they matter for the World Bank? This challenging question was recently posed by World Bank Group President David Malpass to the staff of the Development Research Group. This paper assembles a set of 13...

A recurring theme in the literature on common violence is that it stems from the combined impact of divided societies (poverty, ethnic diversity, economic inequality) and weak institutions (non-democratic, authoritarian government). This statistical regularity may hold in the aggregate, but as...

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...