The Cultural Trade Index aims to shed light on cultural trade and stimulate interest in how this little-known area can contribute to economic diversification, boost shared prosperity, and reduce extreme poverty. As the first index of its kind, the Cultural Trade Index would gather cultural trade...

The present study uses the GIDD, a CGE-microsimulation model for Global Income Distribution Dynamics, to understand the ex-ante dynamics of global income distribution. Three main robust results emerge. First, under a set of realistic assumptions, there will be a reduction in global income...

The paper presents a major overhaul to the World Bank's past estimates of global poverty, incorporating new and better data. Extreme poverty-as judged by what quot;povertyquot; means in the world's poorest countries-is found to be more pervasive than we thought. Yet the data also provide robust...

Health systems are not just about improving health: good ones also ensure that people are protected from the financial consequences of receiving medical care. Anecdotal evidence suggests health systems often perform badly in this respect, apparently with devastating consequences for households,...

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...

Financial liberalization was expected to make interest rates, and asset prices more volatile, with distributional consequences, such as reduced, or relocated rents, and increased competition in financial services. The author examines available data on money market, and bank interest rates for...

Development practitioners are coming to a consensus that participation by the intended beneficiaries improves project performance. But is there convincing evidence that this is true? Skeptics have three objections: 1) quot;Participation is not objective -- project rankings are subjective; 2) this...

There is extensive literature on hospital cost functions for industrial countries, but very little literature for developing countries. Yet the issues facing policy-makers in all countries are much the same: are hospitals overcapitalized, as is often claimed of U.S. hospitals? Are hospitals...

This survey of the state of research on relations between health and economic development discusses first research on how development affects health and then research on how health affects development. Central assumptions include: (A) Health is produced by households, along with a number of...

The idea behind patent policies is to increase the output of commercially useful innovations by creating a transitory propertyy right that allows the inventor to appropriate part of the returns from his invention. In developing countries, two types of considerations need to be addressed. First,...