This IEG evaluation brings a fresh perspective to the debate by assessing the development effectiveness of the Bank's recent work. It presents evidence -- including views from the client countries themselves -- about the outcomes of the Bank's support to individual countries over the past 12...

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...

The 2005 Annual Report on Operations Evaluation (AROE) focuses on the country because it is the main unit of account for monitoring, managing, and evaluating performance. It examines Country Assistance Strategies (CASs) for how well they link country goals, CAS outcomes, and Bank programming. It...

The Financial Sector Assessment Program (FSAP) is a major initiative, undertaken jointly by the World Bank and the IMF, in response to the financial crises of the late 1990s. The ultimate objectives of the program are (i) the identification and resolution of financial sector vulnerabilities and...

This report is a synthesis of three evaluations carried out by the Independent Evaluation Group and completed between July 2005 and February 2006, on different aspects of Bank assistance to financial sector development in client countries. The three evaluation reports are World Bank Lending for...

The 2006 Annual Report on Operations Evaluation (AROE) updates the actions taken since the 2004 and 2005 AROEs to strengthen the results focus in monitoring and evaluation (M&E). First, it analyzes the implications of managing for results on Bank operations. Second, it assesses the extent to...

The goal of Poverty Reduction Support Credits (PRSCs), introduced in early 2001 under World Bank Interim guidelines, was to help countries implement comprehensive, country-owned development strategies to promote growth, improve social conditions, and reduce poverty. PRSCs were intended to ease...

The current global financial and economic crises are likely to put enormous pressure on governments to respond with immediate measures and to undertake far-reaching reforms in the medium term, requiring a substantial increase in donor support. To protect the poor and enhance benefits to them,...

This paper reviews recent impact evaluations of interventions and programs to improve child anthropometric outcomes- height, weight, and birth weight-with an emphasis on both the findings and the limitations of the literature and on understanding what might happen in a non-research setting. It...

This evaluation, which covers the period fiscal 2002-08, finds that the Bank made progress in gender integration, compared with an earlier evaluation by the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) on gender covering the period fiscal 1990-99. Gender integration into Bank support increased both in...