In many low-income countries, improving service delivery can be challenging, whether it's making sure that teachers are in the classroom ready to teach or that cash transfers reach intended beneficiaries. One reason is that it's often difficult to cost-effectively monitor programs, especially...

"Anderson, Damania, and Jackson develop a common-agency lobbying model to help understand why North America and the European Union have adopted such different policies toward genetically modified (GM) food. Their results show that when firms (in this case farmers) lobby policymakers to influence...

Ensuring that women and children receive quality health care is a key to alleviating poverty, but in many developing countries, access to appropriate medical care is limited. In recent years, policymakers and health experts have promoted the use of performance-based bonuses to motivate...

The "Public Service Unit" (PSU), or shiye danwei, is one of the four categories of public sector institutions in China. The country has more than one million public service units (PSUs), or shiye danwei, with a labor force of around 30 million. Most PSUs were created as public service providers....

The study sought to assist governments in introducing school-focused programming into reforms of primary education. The included: (i) an assessment of how well 26 World Bank-assisted project designs for primary education met criteria for educational effectiveness; (ii) the preparation of a...

Indonesia has seen vast improvements in access to education over the past thirty years. It is a good example of a country that has followed a disciplined linear approach to EFA: Indonesia focused first on primary school access, next on lower secondary school access, and is only now attempting to...

The goal was to see whether linking bonus payments to performance had a positive effect. Rwanda, which was forced to rebuild its institutions after the 1994 civil war and genocide, began piloting programs in 2001 to give health clinics cash bonuses for meeting certain healthcare objectives, such...

The Government of Poland benefits from a Technical Assistance Activity in support of the reforms under way in the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. This Technical Assistance accompanies Development Policy Loans financed by the World Bank; its activities have been identified jointly by...

This publication presents a protocol to be used when implementing the Quality, Relevance and Comprehensiveness of Impact Mitigation Services (QIMS) Survey in Swaziland. It also serves as a supervision tool for the National Emergency Council on HIV and AIDS (NERCHA) to oversee implementation of...