At the Frontlines of Development former World Bank country directors recount their experiences, both as managers of the World Bank's programs in global economic hotspots of the 1990s as well as throughout their careers in development economics. These essays detail, among many stories of...

This report examines the underlying economics of different types of digital technologies. It highlights what the new drivers of change are, why the dynamics with this latest round of technological change may be different, and what the distributional impacts may be within and across countries. It...

East Asian Visions: Perspectives on Economic Development is a collection of essays by 17 eminent East Asians who represent a broad spectrum of backgrounds and experiences. All are senior policy makers, statesmen, or scholars who have either had to deal with or think through some of the most...

The region has been transformed by these developments, changing from a set of countries that rapidly integrated with the world to one that is also aggressively exploiting the sources of dynamism that lie within Asia. But countries in East Asia now face the domestic side-effects of rapid growth...

Over the past 25 years, significant levels of public debt and external finance are more likely to have enhanced macroeconomic vulnerability than economic growth in developing countries. This applies not just to countries with a history of high inflation and past default, but also to those in...

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...

Nothing impacts the welfare of individuals and households more directly than employment and earnings opportunities. In developing countries, labor market reform is a crucial component for the success of overall economic policy reforms. Despite success in other areas of economic reform over the...

This report focuses not only on the gaps facing Latin America in both education and technology, but especially on the interactions between the two. The central premise of the report is that skills and technology interact in important ways, and this relationship is a fundamental reason for the...

This report is about the twelve countries of the former Soviet Union (Eurasia). About 85 percent of the region???s economic output is in six resource-rich economies. Today, 85 percent of Eurasia???s 280 million people are no longer poor. But academics who study resource-based economies debate...

About a dozen countries in Latin America have enacted reforms that include elements being contemplated elsewhere, including the partial privatization of social security. It is not easy to draw universal lessons for social security reform from the experience of countries such as Argentina, Chile,...