Developing countries are most exposed to the impact of climate change and within these countries, the poor face the brunt of the burden. Climate change is not a discrete problem that can be dealt with through isolated reforms: impacting economic growth, health, and institutional capacity, it...

Carbon labelling is being adopted by private firms as a mechanism for mitigating climate change. Such schemes are likely to have a significant impact on low-income country exports due to the need for transportation and the small size of their exporters. However, transport emissions may be offset...

Equity emerged as the principal theme during the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management (PREM) week session 'climate change, growth and poverty,' where presenters addressed the distributional consequences of climate change, as well as countries' unequal capacity to cope with the twin...

Many small- and medium-sized emerging exporters in developing countries have inadequate access to short-term working capital to finance their export transactions. This is mainly due to a market failure resulting from informational asymmetries on the part of banks about exporters' ability to...

The World Bank relies in part on economic benefit estimates to evaluate the merits of investment projects. Recent lending operations for revenue administrations in Vietnam have led to some rethinking of these calculations. This Note shares their findings and it also provides some pointers that...

Development practitioners have been working for half a century to help pull millions of people out of poverty, disease, and fear. However, the challenge of poverty remains enormous. The disparity in levels of income, health, and education across countries grows greater, even as levels of...

This document specifies, most east asian countries have increasingly shifted responsibilities for infrastructure services to subnational tiers of governments. Infrastructure service provision involves a broad set of functions, including setting investment priorities, building and operating...

The Poverty Action Fund (PAF) was introduced in Uganda in 1998 to reorient government expenditures towards implementing its Poverty Education Action Plan (PEAP) as well as to account for Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) resource use. This paper notes the successes of the PAR, the negative...

Bank support for civil service reform (CSR) in developing countries used to focus mainly on improving government pay, and employment practices. In recent years, CSR programs have sought a broader set of management improvements. But getting public pay and employment right is still fundamental:...

Substantial improvement in the delivery of health services will be necessary to achieve the health-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). A review of developing country experience with contracting for health service delivery was undertaken to examine its effectiveness, determine the extent...