Do World Bank policy loans that are focused on social policy reform help improve social policies and institutions in borrower countries? To help answer this question, this paper provides new empirical evidence of the association between World Bank policy lending and measures of the quality of...

Proxy-means testing is a popular method of poverty targeting with imperfect information. In a now widely-used version, a regression for log consumption calibrates a proxy-means test score based on chosen covariates, which is then implemented for targeting out-of-sample. In this paper, the...

Few economic ideas are as intuitive as the notion that increasing investment is the best way to raise future output. This idea was the basis for the theory quot;capital fundamentalism.quot; Under this view, differences in national stocks of capital were the primary determinants of differences in...

This survey of the state of research on relations between health and economic development discusses first research on how development affects health and then research on how health affects development. Central assumptions include: (A) Health is produced by households, along with a number of...

The idea behind patent policies is to increase the output of commercially useful innovations by creating a transitory propertyy right that allows the inventor to appropriate part of the returns from his invention. In developing countries, two types of considerations need to be addressed. First,...

Protectionism and industrial regulation are two topics in which the interplay of politics and economics is so strong that one wonders why the intellectual merger between the two approaches in the New Political Economy has taken so long. After describing the emergence of the state in Western...

Mauritania is a resource-rich developing country. As many other African nations, it will not reach most of the Millennium Development Goals, unless the authorities commit to accelerating progress. To succeed by 2015, the government needs to: mobilize additional financial resources, introduce...

This paper reviews the empirical and theoretical literature on economic growth to examine how the four components of the climate change bill, namely mitigation, proactive (ex ante) adaptation, reactive (ex post) adaptation, and ultimate damages of climate change affect growth, especially in...

Universities in Latin America are increasingly considered instruments of social and economic development and face rising expectations in regard to supplying relevant skills, undertaking applied research, and engaging in commercial activity. The paper discusses trends and challenges within Latin...

The empirical literature on finance and development suggests that countries with better developed financial systems experience faster economic growth. Financial development - as captured by size, depth, efficiency, and reach of financial systems - varies sharply around the world, with large...