Do World Bank policy loans that are focused on social policy reform help improve social policies and institutions in borrower countries? To help answer this question, this paper provides new empirical evidence of the association between World Bank policy lending and measures of the quality of...

The adoption of the shared prosperity goal by the World Bank in 2013 and Sustainable Development Goal 10, on inequality, by the United Nations in 2015 should strengthen the focus of development interventions and cooperation on the income growth of the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution...

This study investigates how government ideology matters for the success of World Bank economic policy loans, which typically support market-liberalizing reforms. A simple model predicts that World Bank staff will invest more effort in designing an economic policy loan when faced with a left-wing...

This study investigates the impact of World Bank development policy lending for public sector governance on the quality of public sector management and institutions. The World Bank’s Country Policy and Institutional Assessments (CPIA) are used to measure the latter, the study considers only...

This study investigates the impact of World Bank development policy lending on the quality of economic policy. It finds that the quality of policy increases, but at a diminishing rate, with the cumulative number of policy loans. Similar results hold for the cumulative number of conditions...