The Sustainable Development Goals are an ambitious set of targets for global development progress by 2030 that were agreed by the United Nations in 2015. Amongst the 169 targets are a number that call for universal access, universal coverage, or universal eradication. These include ending...

This paper attempts a first-cut listing of global public goods and international spillover activities, as well as providing some data on their global distribution alongside basic correlational analysis. Few if any goods are “pure” global public goods and there is a spectrum of the extent of...

The Tropical Forest Finance Facility is a proposal to establish a pay-for-performance mechanism to finance reduced deforestation of tropical forests. The proposal would maximize the efficient use of public credit and builds on major technology breakthroughs for measuring results. This paper...

The paper critically reviews the arguments for and against both employment guarantees and income guarantees when viewed as rights-based policy instruments for poverty reduction in a developing economy, with special reference to India. Evidence on India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Act...

This paper discusses the role for policy integration to speed progress towards delivering the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This is required because the goals set very ambitious targets for progress across a range of interlinked areas, encompassing both synergies and tradeoffs. Lessons...

Drawing on six sweeps of household surveys of Nigeria that together span 1980–2010 with a pooled sample size of about 97,000 households and data on Nigeria's age-gender-specific life expectancy from the World Health Organization, this paper shows that about 72 percent to 91 percent of...

Independent verification is a critical component of performance-based financing (PBF) in health care, in which facilities are offered incentives to increase the volume of specific services but the same incentives may lead them to over-report. We examine alternative strategies for targeted...

Individuals do escape poverty during periods of overall rise in the poverty rate; they also transit into poverty during periods of overall decline in the poverty rate. A static poverty estimate drawn from independent cross surveys tends to obscure these details because it is unable to provide...

Employment generation is crucial to spreading the benefits of economic growth broadly and to reducing global poverty. And yet, emerging economies face a contemporary challenge to traditional pathways to employment generation: automation, digitalization, and labor-saving technologies. 1.8 billion...

This paper assesses the resilience of Paraguay's economic and financial stability to external shocks. To this end, the paper expands on previous work by Rojas-Suarez (2015) and constructs a resilience indicator that has two dimensions: the first refers to the capacity of an economy to withstand...