Program administrators are often faced with the difficult problem of allocating scarce resources among regions in a country when interventions are aimed at addressing multiple objectives. One main concern is the tradeoff between poverty reduction and improvement of environmental quality. To...

No country has achieved sustained economic development without substantially investing in human capital. Previous studies have shown the handsome returns to various forms of basic education, research, training, learning-by-doing, and capacity-building. But education by itself does not guarantee...

There have been extensive theoretical studies of firms'responses to environmental regulations ad enforcement but few empirical analyses of firms'expenditures on pollution abatement in response to different regulations and enforcement strategies. The authors empirically analyze the pollution...

Public provision of education has often been perceived as universal and egalitarian, but in reality it is not. Political pressure typically results in incidence bias in favor of the rich. The author argues that the bias in political influence resulting from extreme income inequalities is...

Growth is pro-poor if the poverty measure of interest falls. According to this definition there are three potential sources of pro-poor growth: (1) a high rate of growth of average incomes; (2) a high sensitivity of poverty to growth in average incomes; and (3) a poverty-reducing pattern of...

In recent years -as a result of economic contraction, declining employment and real wages, and changes in labor market behavior- Ukraine's tax base of the social security system has declined, threatening its sustainability. About 40 percent of the labor force works in the informal sector, paying...

Labor market integration is typically assumed to improve welfare in the absence of distortions, because it allows labor to move to where returns are highest. The author examines this result in a simple general equilibrium model in the presence of a common property resource: social capital....

The authors analyze the effects of building height restrictions, providing a concrete welfare cost estimate for the city of Bangalore, India. Relying on several theoretical results, their analysis shows that the welfare cost imposed on its residents by Bangalore's building height restriction...

Countries emerging from civil war attract both aid and policy advice. This paper provides the first systematic empirical analysis of aid and policy reform in the post-conflict growth process. It is based on a comprehensive data set of large civil wars and covers 27 countries that were in their...

About 20,000 early childhood development centers provided day care for and prepared for primary school more than 1 million children aged three to seven (roughly 20 percent of children in that age group) in Kenya in 1995. The number of child care facilities reached 23,690 by the end of 1999. The...