This is the sixth Annual Review of Development Effectiveness (ARDE), covering the year 2002, whose findings indicate that the Bank's country, sector, and global programs are consistent with the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) themes, increasingly focused on poverty reduction. The review...

This paper, based on a recent OED review of World Bank social fund projects, presents findings relating to two aspects of social fund performance that have been relatively under-researched in the social funds literature-the sustainability of benefits and the institutional development impacts. On...

Home to almost 500 million people, roughly half of whom earn less than a dollar a day, fragile states, until recently known in the World Bank as Low-Income Countries Under Stress (LICUS), have attracted increasing attention. The Bank identified 25 such countries in fiscal 2005 based on their...