Downsizing programs are an important part of many public sector reforms supported by the World Bank. Although these programs can reduce budget deficits and address inefficiencies caused by state-led development strategies, many observers are concerned about the political and social consequences...

Institutional and Governance Reviews (IGRs) are a new tool in the Bank's package of analytical and advisory activities (see PREMnote 75). Because they are politically sensitive, the development of these reviews involves careful tradeoffs. Though each requires thorough analysis of a country's...

Decentralization holds a lot of promise, but whether it improves public service delivery depends on the institutional arrangements governing its implementation. Several conditions must be met before the full benefits of decentralization can be reaped. First, for decentralization to increase...

The World Bank has helped Albania, Georgia, and Latvia measure corruption and design strategies to combat it and improve governance. This note explains how empirical surveys can inform and transform the policy dialogue, so that a workable anticorruption agenda can be established. Early results...

Public Expenditure Tracking Surveys (PETS) can serve as a powerful tool to inform prevailing public financial management (PFM) practices and the extent to which government budgets link to execution and desired service delivery objectives and beneficiaries. Since the first PETS in Uganda in 1996,...

While there are strong theoretical arguments for ways in which public spending influences growth, robust empirical links have been difficult to establish. More recently, many of the methodological problems that plagued the earlier literature have been overcome and interesting policy lessons...

The Poverty Action Fund (PAF) was introduced in Uganda in 1998 to reorient government expenditures towards implementing its Poverty Education Action Plan (PEAP) as well as to account for Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) resource use. This paper notes the successes of the PAR, the negative...

Domestic consumption in most countries is taxed through general sales taxes, excise taxes on specific commodities, and a variety of miscellaneous taxes on such services as hotels and transfers of property. This note considers only the first two of these categories, with particular attention to...

Services play a broad and strategic role in the economy. The new focus in services arises because they have become increasingly tradable, allowing for the emergence of new and improved export activities. Trade in services, particularly business services, has become a dynamic component of trade...

Recent events have rekindled interest in the role of primary commodities in development. Was the boom in commodity prices from around 2003 through 2008 just a cyclical event, or does it suggests that prices have entered on a period of secular strength, driven by factors such as demand in big,...