Recent literature contains many stories of how foreign aid affects economic growth: aid raises growth in countries with good policies, or in countries with difficult economic environments, or mainly outside the tropics, or on average with diminishing returns. The diversity of these results...

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...

Ghost towns dot the West of the United States. These cities boomed for a period and then, for various reasons, fell into a process of decline and have shrunk to a small fraction of their former population. Are there ghost countries - countries that, if there were population mobility, would only...

Among partisans of greenhouse gas emissions regulation, the Senate's failure to pass the Warner-Lieberman cap-and-trade bill is often attributed to rampant denial, fueled by diehard political conservatism, energy-company propaganda, and government suppression of evidence on global warming. If...

In the face of continuing development challenges in the world's poorest countries, there have been new calls throughout the donor community to increase the volume of development aid. Equal attention is needed to reform of the aid business itself, that is, the practices and processes and...

Raising school enrollment, like economic development in general, takes a long time. This is partly because, as a mountain of empirical evidence now shows, economic conditions and slowly-changing parental education levels determine children's school enrollment to a greater degree than education...

The paper addresses three key issues raised by the G-7 in its proposals to reform the multilateral banks, in 2001. One, the restructuring of IDA with a part of its lending in the form of grants ratherthan loans. Two, the harmonization of procedures, policies and overlapping mandates among MDBs....

When can a donor (successfully) exit from an on-the-ground presence in a post-conflict state? The answer, according to the analysis presented here, is in decades: figures well beyond what was originally envisioned when peacekeeping troops were first deployed. In the specific cases of Liberia,...

This paper reviews, in non-technical terms, the case for and against using tests of learning for measuring annual educational progress within programs of progress-based aid. It addresses three questions about testing in developing countries. One, are valid and reliable measures of student...

The US government's proposed $5 billion Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) could provide upwards of $250-$300m or more per year per country in new development assistance to a small number of poor countries judged to have relatively quot;goodquot; policies and institutions. Could this assistance...