While everyone agrees that GDP per capita is an inadequate measure of a country’s overall “development” it is difficult to specify what, if anything, should take its place as a useful single summary number (or even just ranking). The Human Development Index is a prominent alternative which...

Skilled workers emigrate from developing countries in rising numbers, raising fears of a drain on the human and financial resources of the countries they leave. This paper critiques existing policy proposals to address the development effects of skilled migration. It then proposes a new kind of...

Countries restrict the overall extent of international travel and migration to balance the expected costs and benefits of mobility. Given the ever-present threat of new, future pandemics, how should permanent restrictions on mobility respond? A simple theoretical framework predicts that reduced...

This paper shows how value judgments can be explicitly recognized in measuring health ineqalities between the poor and the better-off, and how such inequalities can be included in assessments of countries' health indicators

Exploiting cross-birth cohort and cross-country variation from a pool of 188 household surveys from 111 countries, this paper measures how life expectancy at birth affects lifetime education and earnings. On average, individuals add one year of schooling for every 8.3 years of increased life...

Executive Directors continued to play an important role as the World Bank faced many challenges in a global post crisis economy. The Board considered a number of key documents in preparation for the committee on development effectiveness meetings. These included the World Development Report...