Consideration of lifelong learning extends the World Bank's traditional approach to education, in which subsectors are looked at in isolation. Three years ago, when he articulated the Comprehensive Development Framework, World Bank President James Wolfensohn referred explicitly to lifelong...

Despite the existence of about one billion illiterates in the world, adult literacy programs make up 1-5 percent of government or donor budgets, and they remain severely underfunded in comparison to primary education. Though dropout and course completion rates improved in the 1990s, the outcomes...

This book talks about participation, from the first to the last page. And that is its strength, for participation is a road leading to democracy. The true participation it talks about does not rely on hours of compulsory labor or imposed levies; there is nothing forced about it. Rather, it is a...

Pension reform is an important topic, high on the agendas of most European countries, where countries are profoundly affected by an aging population, the result of lower fertility, and increased life expectancy, changes in family structure, and the effects of globalization. The book presents...

Historically, industrialized countries dominated trade negotiations from the establishment of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) through the lengthy Uruguay Round (UR) negotiations in the 1980s and 1990s. These negotiations established the World Trade Organization (WTO)-the GATT's...

At the economic level, corruption is seen as a contributing factor to the East Asian financial crisis. The crisis focused people's attention on the staggering impact of corruption, particularly in Indonesia, the Republic of Korea, and Thailand. The interlocking relationship of business and...

This review of the active portfolio of World Bank projects aimed at improving urban environmental quality was carried out during 2002-03 in order to assess the level of commitment of the institution to urban sustainability. The review focuses on the contributions of key sectors to urban...

This report studies impediments to investment and private sector development in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, and Serbia and Montenegro. It aims to yield fundamentally new insights for improving the region's...

The paper cover two broad themes in the recent reform of fiscal and economic management in Afghanistan. The first part, The Journey So Far, sets out the impressive policy and institutional reforms that the Interim and Transitional Administrations have made since the Bonn conference in November...

This study evaluated present levels of access to financial services in Brazil and government policies that have had an impact on access. Based on these findings, the study explored options for increasing future access to financial services in Brazil. The first section of this summary highlights...