Many of the world's poorest and most fragile states are joining the ranks of oil and gas producers. These countries face critical policy questions about managing and spending new revenue in a way that is beneficial to their people. At the same time, a growing number of developing countries have...

International Development Association (IDA) donors and others operating a country performance-based allocation system face two difficult problems: how to strengthen incentives to produce and document development results and how to increase flexibility for fragile states. Fragile states have the...

With the Millennium Development Goals deadline only five years away, the international donor community faces significant challenges due to the global economic crisis, record government deficits, and simultaneous funding requests from nearly every multilateral development institution. This paper...

In this paper we analyze the Washington Consensus, which at its original formulation reflected views not only from Washington but also from Latin America. We trace the life of the Consensus from a Latin American perspective in terms of evolving economic development paradigms. We document the...

This study uses a unique natural experiment to test a simple model of international differences in workers' wages and productivity. Large differences in wages across countries could arise from several sources. These include barriers to trade in outputs, differences in technology, differences in...

This paper examines the potential benefits and costs of providing duty-free, quota-free market access to the least developed countries (LDCs), and the effects of extending eligibility to other small and poor countries. Using the MIRAGE computable general equilibrium model, it assesses the impact...

The slower spread of AIDS in South Asian countries, combined with the fact that most South Asian countries have higher per capita incomes than the most severely affected countries of other regions imply that the various impacts of the disease will be smaller in South Asia than in the worst...

Ghana's largest and most important creditor for the past three decades has been the International Development Association (IDA), the soft loan window of the World Bank. That will soon come to an end. The combination of Ghana's rapid economic growth and the recent GDP rebasing exercise means that...

In 2007, the state of Andhra Pradesh in southern India began rolling out the Aarogyasri health insurance to reduce catastrophic health expenditures in households “below the poverty line.” We exploit variation in program roll-out over time and districts to evaluate the impacts of the scheme...

A number of banks in developed countries argue that the new capital requirements under Basel III are too stringent and that implementing the proposed regulation would require raising large amounts of capital, with adverse consequences on credit and the cost of finance. In contrast, many emerging...