A potential concern with survey-based data on corruption is that respondents may not be fully candid in their responses to sensitive questions. If reticent respondents are less likely to admit to involvement in corrupt acts, and if the proportion of reticent respondents varies across groups of...

Estimates of the extent of corruption rely largely on self-reports of individuals, business managers, and government officials. Yet it is well known that survey respondents are reticent to tell the truth about activities to which social and legal stigma are attached, implying a downward bias in...

This paper develops a structural approach for modeling how respondents answer survey questions and uses it to estimate the proportion of respondents who are reticent in answering corruption questions, as well as the extent to which reticent behavior biases down conventional estimates of...

This paper describes the methodology for a new World Bank Human Capital Index (HCI). The HCI combines indicators of health and education into a measure of the human capital that a child born today can expect to obtain by her 18th birthday, given the risks of poor education and health that...

The authors use data from more than 6,000 World Bank projects evaluated between 1983 and 2009 to investigate macro and micro correlates of project outcomes. They find that country-level "macro" measures of the quality of policies and institutions are very strongly correlated with project...

Many highly-disaggregated cross-country indicators of institutional quality and the business environment have been developed in recent years. The promise of these indicators is that they can be used to identify specific reform priorities that policymakers and aid donors can target in their...

The report points out that over the past decade measuring corruption has become an ever-growing empirical field. This empirical analysis questions the traditional notion of viewing the firm as an 'investment climate taker' and thus ignoring the view that powerful conglomerates can also shape the...

This paper examines the determinants of "debt distress," which they define as periods in which countries resort to exceptional finance in any of three forms: (1) significant arrears on external debt, (2) Paris Club rescheduling, and (3) nonconcessional International Monetary Fund lending. Using...

Progress in measuring governance is assessed using a simple framework that distinguishes between indicators that measure formal rules and indicators that measure the practical application or outcomes of these rules. The analysis calls attention to the strengths and weaknesses of both types of...