The Southeast Asian Tigers feel threatened. Even though their growth rates have remained above the average for the world and also above the average for developing countries, their economic performance falls short of that in the first half of the 1990s. The underlying worry is that it presages...

More than 200 new infrastructure regulators have been created around the world in the last 15 years. They were established to encourage clear and sustainable long-term economic and legal commitments by governments and investors to encourage new investment to benefit existing and new customers....

This Sourcebook deals with social analysis in policy reform, encompassing the transition from gaining a better understanding of the distributional impacts of proposed or continuing reform to influencing a more informed and locally embedded process of policy review and design. In a generic sense,...

Many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa see information and communication technology (ICT) as a necessary foundation for long-term economic development. While the region has been very successful in increasing access to basic voice communications, there has been no comparable improvement in...

This report takes a dispassionate and critical look at the rise of China and India, and asks questions about this growth: Where is it occurring? Who is benefiting most? Is it sustainable? And what are the implications for the rest of the world? The book considers whether the giants' growth will...

The overarching theme of the book is development in a land of contrasts. There have been large economic, social, and political changes. The mass of society is far more expressive and politically involved today. In 1945, the country had 7.4 million voters, about 11 percent of the population....

This Toolkit aims to help developing country governments, interested in using private firms to help expand access to safe water and sanitation services at reasonable cost. Specifically, it aims to help them, and their advisers design arrangements that maximize the benefits for their countries,...

This book grew out of the Global Issues seminars and is itself a testament to that two-way dialogue: the suggestion to compile the speakers' lecture notes into a book came from the students themselves. Both the seminars and this book reflect the Bank's conviction that the seemingly intractable...

Globalization and its relation to poverty reduction and development are not well understood. The book identifies the ways in which globalization can overcome poverty or make it worse. The book defines the big historical trends, identifies main global flows-trade, finance, aid, migration, and...

This book identifies key investment climate bottlenecks that slow down growth and poverty reduction. Based on face-to-face surveys of owners and managers of firms, combined with extensive dataset analysis, backed by secondary sources, the study analyses the critical factors that influence...