Providing information to the public is an essential but insufficient step in making local government more transparent. A participatory process is also needed, both to ensure accountability and to reinforce healthy relationships between people and government. Empirical data linked to a...

World Bank-supported efforts to reform public institutions--including tax and customs administration--increasingly rely on institutional analysis. But there are no formal, generally accepted guidelines for analyzing tax systems. As a result the Bank's task managers and team leaders conduct these...

Prospects for developing countries have improved considerably in the past six months finds the World Bank's just-released "Global Development Finance 2000." Industrial country output and world trade growth have become stronger and more broadly based. Although prices for primary commodities have...

Inter-household transfers are an important resource for low-income households, yet have been almost ignored by donors. Though they are no substitute for public programs, these private transfers merit more attention in poverty research, gender analysis, project design, and development strategies....

Donors have typically linked quick-disbursing assistance programs to conditions related to policy reforms. But there is growing frustration with how conditionality has worked in practice. Research has shown that traditional conditionality usually does not "buy" reforms. Moreover, because aid...

For almost 50 years judges, lawyers, and policymakers in the United States have experimented with ways to speed up the processing of civil and criminal cases. Several lessons have emerged from this effort: a) Delays cannot be legislated away. b) Commitment is essential. c) Incentives must be...

A successful anti-corruption strategy must have a free press to voice public opinion and report cases of corruption, an effective and politically neutral mechanism to investigate and prosecute corruption, and a reliable judicial process to punish wrongdoing when it is proved. It is rare to find...

A gnawing critique of civil service reform efforts persists, intimating that these civil service reform operations of the World Bank have boosted neither efficiency nor effectiveness. The outlines of the problem are fairly clear: civil service pay and employment reforms have had only limited...

The World Bank defines corruption as the abuse of public office for private gain. Corrupt actions include the unilateral theft of public property by its steward and multi-party transactions in which beneficiaries bribe officials. Corruption can exist at all levels of public administration--from...

Monitoring and evaluation systems are often the least addressed component of project design, and implementation. Yet, such systems have considerable potential for enhancing the impact of projects, and the understanding of poverty reduction impacts. This note addresses what makes effective...