This book is organized as follows: Introduction; by William Easterly and Luis Serven Latin America's Infrastructure in The Era of Macroeconomic Crises; by Cesar Calderon, William Easterly, and Luis Serven The Output Cost of Latin America's Infrastructure Gap; by Cesar Calderon and Luis Serven...

This report is a self-evaluation of the Operations Evaluation Department's (OED) Country Assistance Evaluations (CAEs). CAEs examine World Bank performance in a particular country, usually over the past four to five years, and report on its conformity with the relevant Bank Country Assistance...

In the Pacific island countries, which are small and far from world markets, labor mobility represents the most significant and substantial opportunity for overcoming geographic constraints on employment. This report presents a brief overview of employment challenges in small Pacific island...

Good public procurement practices are a major determinant of the effectiveness of public expenditure. On behalf of their citizens, governments typically spend as much as 5-20 percent of their gross domestic product on procurement of goods and services, and effective procurement policies enable...

This paper examines the links between governance and the Extractive Industries sector, and considers the implications of those links for the work of the World Bank. This evaluation takes place on the heels of important complementary World Bank initiatives, upon which it draws. The Bank has...

The little data book 2012 is a pocket edition of world development indicators 2012. The 216 country tables in the little data book present the latest available data for World Bank member countries and other economies with populations of more than 30,000. For operational and analytical purposes...

Nations around the world (both large and small, rich and poor) are engaged in debate over how to reform their social security systems and care for the aged. For many countries this debate requires speculation on hypothetical scenarios, but in Latin America a rich body of experience on social...

The recent growth in investor-state arbitration has continued apace. International Center for Settlement of Investment Dispute (ICSID) registered a record 38 cases in 2011, and had registered 19 further cases by June 30, 2012. Included in these numbers are 3 new conciliation cases, showing an...

Any time there is an economic crisis; there is the very real potential that its consequences for human welfare will be severe. Thus when the developed world plunged into such a crisis in 2008 and growth rates in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) began to plummet, fears rose that the region...

Restrictions on economic activity in area C of the West Bank have been particularly detrimental to the Palestinian economy. Area C constitutes about 61 percent of the West Bank territory. Area C is richly endowed with natural resources and it is contiguous, whereas areas A and B are smaller...