Many Latin American governments have radically restructured their old age income security systems, starting with Chile's 1981 pension reform. The reforms move national pension system from purely social to largely individual responsibility; from risk pooling to individual savings accounts. They...

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...

Early childhood experiences lay the foundation for outcomes later in life. Policy makers in developing countries face a dual challenge of promoting access to and quality of early childhood development services, but evidence on how to manage this trade-off is scarce. This paper studies two...

Why is there so little industry in Africa? Over the past forty years, industry and business interests have moved increasingly from the developed to the developing world, yet Africa's share of global manufacturing has fallen from about 3 percent in 1970 to less than 2 percent in 2014. Industry is...

For a growing number of countries in Africa the discovery and exploitation of natural resources is a great opportunity, but one accompanied by considerable risks. This book presents research on how to better manage the revenues and opportunities associated with natural resources.

This book is a collection of essays that seeks to answer three interrelated sets of questions about Africa's recent growth recovery. The first set of essays addresses questions about the drivers and durability of Africa's growth. How different is current economic performance compared to Africa's...

This paper examines the country-level dynamics of long-run growth in Africa between 1975 and 2005. The authors examine how growth has affected mobility and the distribution of income among countries. They analyze changes in cross-country income structure and convergence, and look for evidence of...

This paper uses a new, 2005/06 nationally-representative household survey to analyze the impact of internal remittances (from Ghana) and international remittances (from African and other countries) on poverty and inequality in Ghana. To control for selection and endogeneity, it uses a two-stage...

Low and highly volatile growth define Africa's growth experience. But there is no evidence that growth volatility is associated to long term economic performance. This result may be misleading if it suggests that volatility is not important for economic and social progress. In this paper we use...

Using the most recent purchasing power parity data for 44 sub-Saharan African countries, this paper examines the characteristics of long run growth in Africa between 1975 and 2005. The authors investigate the following issues: cross-country income structure, income convergence, the country level...