In principle, the efficiency of poverty-oriented social programs can be increased dramatically through "targeting" an infelicitous term applied to efforts to focus development programs more directly on the poor. By one widely-cited estimate, a set of "perfectly targeted" programs -- that is,...

Barber B. Conable, President of the World Bank Group addressed the topic of Australian International Development at the 1989 annual meetings. Poverty, and its persistence alongside such wellbeing, is both a moral outrage and a threat to security. The challenge of poverty is an economic,...

This paper analyses the role of good governance in fostering pro-poor and inclusive growth. Using a sample of 112 countries over 1975-2012, it shows that growth is generally pro-poor. However, growth has not been inclusive, as illustrated by a decline in the bottom 20 percent of the income...

The digitalization and development of new financial products accelerated by Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) crisis will transform drastically the financial sector of all countries in the following years. Consequently, this will also lead to the transformation of supervisory processes, which can be...

This paper examines the poverty impacts of global merchandise trade reform by looking at a wide range of developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Overall, the authors find that trade reform tends to reduce poverty primarily through the inclusion of agricultural components. The...

This paper assesses the potential impacts of the removal of agricultural and other trade distortions using a newly developed dataset and methodological approach for evaluating the global poverty and inequality effects of policy reforms. It finds that liberalization of agriculture will increase...

This paper analyzes the economic effects of agricultural price and merchandise trade policies around the world as of 2004 on global markets, net farm incomes, and national and regional economic welfare and poverty, using the global economy wide Linkage model, new estimates of agricultural price...

Reforms in recent decades have sharply reduced the distortions affecting agriculture in developing countries, particularly by cuts to agricultural export taxes and by some reductions in government assistance to agriculture in high-income countries, but international trade in farm products...

The World Bank Group (WBG) has been active in public and private sector pollution management for the past several decades. The Bank has mainstreamed environmental health concerns into its rural and urban services through projects that improved the management of solid and hazardous waste and...

Outside of China, despite rapid economic growth in many low and middle income countries, there has been little progress in meeting the MDG1 target of halving the incidence of global poverty by 2014. Part of the explanation for this weak poverty-reducing performance has been the historic...