This paper focuses on how budgetary score-keeping systems affect governments' ability or willingness to support innovative development finance initiatives and explores several options to overcome the restrictions the systems often impose. As a starting point, it assumes that donor governments,...

Construction is a $1.7 trillion industry worldwide, much of which is linked to publicly financed projects. Outcomes from this financing are frequently suboptimal. Cost and time escalation, as well as poor quality, are linked to weak governance and corruption, which are endemic in the sector....

We experimentally test the impact of expanding access to basic bank accounts in Uganda, Malawi, and Chile. Over two years, 17 percent, 10 percent, and 3 percent of treatment individuals made five or more deposits, respectively. Average monthly deposits for them were at the 79th, 91st, and 96th...

Rich countries have made efforts for half a century to help people in poor countries catch up to rich-country standards of living. Those efforts have included giving foreign aid, encouraging overseas investment, dismantling trade barriers, and spreading ideas and institutions. That is, their...

USAID launched a project in 1995 to deliver basic health services in Haiti. The project began by reimbursing contracted NGOs for documented expenditures or inputs. In 1999, payment was changed to being based partly on attaining performance targets or outputs. The project also provided technical...

During the 1990s, the World Bank and several donor partners provided a “surge” in external aid to support Pakistan's social sectors. Despite the millions of donor dollars spent, the program failed. Poverty was higher in Pakistan in 2004 than it was a decade earlier when the antipoverty...

Oil and other mineral rents are, in most countries, owned by producing states on behalf of their citizens. The paper focuses on three questions. First, how should countries take into account the great uncertainty over future export prices in planning their spending programs? Second, how should...

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...

The international financial crisis of 2008–09 exposed the strengths and weaknesses of the current paradigm of development in Latin America, a paradigm based on liberalized capital accounts and significantly improved macroeconomic conditions. This paper presents lessons derived from the crisis,...