Using surveys and administrative data from post-war Liberia, the hypothesis that peacekeeping deployments build peace "from the bottom up" through contributions to local security and local economic and social vitality was tested. The hypothesis reflects official thinking about how peacekeeping...

One of the two goals of the World Bank Group's new strategy is to promote shared prosperity, defined as the income growth of the bottom 40 percent of the population. The simple monitoring indicator then is the income per capita of the bottom 40 percent of the population. The growth of this...

Urban areas tend to have much more productive labor and higher salaries than rural areas, and there are vast differences across urban areas. Areas with high salaries and high productivity tend to have employers that invest in much more research and development than areas with low salaries and...

The emergence of global value chains has opened up new ways to achieve development and industrialization. However, new evidence shows that not all countries have gained from participating in global value chains, and that country-specific characteristics matter for economic upgrading in global...

The paper analyzes the impact of the recent global crisis in the context of the previous two decades' growth and capital flows. Growth decomposition exercises show that Egyptian growth is driven mostly by capital accumulation. To estimate the share of labor in national income, the analysis...

Although Kenya's financial system is by far the largest and most developed in East Africa and its stability has improved significantly over the past years, many challenges remain. This paper assesses the stability, efficiency, and outreach of Kenya's banking system, using aggregate, bank-level,...

This literature review summarizes the link between psychological well-being and entrepreneurial outcomes for small and medium-size enterprises in fragile, conflict, and violence-affected contexts. It identifies potentially promising, scalable psychosocial training interventions, based on...

The authors conduct an econometric analysis of the economic and social factors which contributed to the spread of violent conflict in Nepal. They find that conflict intensity is significantly higher in places with greater poverty and lower levels of economic development. Violence is higher in...

The institutional landscape of local dispute resolution in Bangladesh is rich: it includes the traditional process of shalish, longstanding and impressive civil society efforts to improve on shalish, and a somewhat less-explored provision for gram adalat or village courts. Based on a nationally...

The recent political upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa region have exposed growing concerns about conflict risk, political stability, and reform prospects across its societies. Given the prevalence of oil and gas resource endowments in the region, which a voluminous literature...