The private sector has an indispensable role to play in advancing climate adaptation and resilience building. The need for private sector solutions to address climate change impacts is even more pronounced in Africa given its sizable needs for adaptation and the limited fiscal space of most...

The size of government defined as the share of the public expenditure in GDP measures the magnitude of resources that are under the control of the public sector and available for reallocation across sectors, income groups and geographical locations. This note focuses on the determinants of...

Evidence from a large panel of low-income and lower middle-income countries over the period 1995-2012 suggests that, contrary to other countries, public investment in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) has been pro-cyclical. Public investment contracts more in "bad times" than...

Promoting sustainable development calls for investing rents from exhaustible mineral resources into human, physical and social capital, so as to protect the wealth of countries and the economic opportunities of their citizens. This has been difficult in well-governed Ghana in the last decade; and...

The objective of this paper is to inform Liberia's medium-term growth and development strategy for 2012-17 and its National Vision: Liberia Rising 2030, both of which are under preparation. The analysis is based on MAMS (Maquette for MDG [Millennium Development Goal]) Simulations, a computable...

With growing international skilled labor mobility, education and migration decisions have become increasingly inter-related, and potentially have a large impact on the growth trajectories of source countries, through their effects on labor supply, savings, or the cost of education. The authors...

This paper uses a computable general equilibrium model to assess the welfare impact of commodity price inflation in Tanzania and possible tax policy responses in the short, medium, and long term. The results suggest that global commodity inflation since 2006 may have had a significantly negative...

This paper uses a sample of 73 developing countries to estimate the change in the cost of alleviating urban poverty brought about by the recent increase in food prices. This cost is approximated by the change in the poverty deficit, that is, the variation in financial resources required to...

This paper attempts to identify Lebanon's greatest constraints to economic growth, following a growth diagnosis approach. It concludes that fiscal imbalances and barriers to entry are most binding on long-term growth. Macroeconomic imbalances and related perceived risks affect the nature of...

July 2001When investments in education in developing countries do not produce higher growth, the problem may be the quality of the schooling - of the education infrastructure, of the initial endowment in human capital, and of the system's ability to equitably distribute educational services. The...