Market-oriented economic policies-reflected in limited economic activity by government, protection of private property rights, sound monetary policy, outward orientation regarding trade and efficient tax and regulatory policy-have been strongly linked to faster rates of economic growth. Foreign...

Over the past decade, donors of foreign aid quadrupled their annual contributions to trust funds at the World Bank. This earmarking of contributions to donors' preferred recipient countries and issues has raised concerns about the alignment of trust funds with the performance-based allocations...

The empirical literature on institutions and development has been challenged on grounds of reverse causality, measurement error in institutional indicators, and heterogeneity. This paper uses firm-level data across countries to confront these challenges. Instead of analyzing ultimate outcomes,...

This paper assesses corruption levels and trends among countries in the transition countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA) based on data from several sources that are both widely used and cover most or all countries in the region. Data from firm surveys tend to show improvement in...

This paper analyzes the impact of donor fragmentation on the quality of government bureaucracy in aid-recipient nations. A formal model of a donor's decision to hire government administrators to manage donor-funded projects predicts that the number of administrators hired declines as the donor's...

The availability of windfall revenues from natural resource exports or foreign aid potentially weakens governments' incentives to design efficient tax systems. Cross-country data for developing countries provide evidence for this hypothesis, using a World Bank indicator of "efficiency of revenue...

Aggregate indexes of the quality of governance, covering large samples of countries, are widely used in research and in aid policy. Few studies examine the validity of these indexes, however. This paper partially fills this gap by examining empirically the dimensionality of the Worldwide...

Good governance -- in the form of institutions that establish predictable, impartial, and consistently enforced rules for investors -- is crucial for the sustained and rapid growth of per capita incomes in poor countries. Aid dependence can undermine institutional quality by weakening...

Most efforts to trace the effects of income inequality on growth have focused on redistribution. However, empirical investigation has not substantiated either the positive association of income inequality with redistribution or the negative association of redistribution with economic growth. The...

Several authors claim to provide evidence that government corruption is less severe in small than in large countries. The authors demonstrate that this relationship is an artifact of sample selection. Most corruption indicators provide ratings only for the countries in which multi-national...