We investigate the empirical impact of violence as compared to other trade impediments on trade flows. Our analysis is based on a panel data set with annual observations on 177 countries from 1968 to 1999, which brings together information from the Rose [2004] dataset, the ITERATE dataset for...

The aim of this work is to facilitate access to the wealth of data in the 52 background papers behind the World Health Organization’s (WHO) 2010 World Health Report, for health researchers and policymakers alike. Throughout the 52 sections, a consistent logic (title, authors, number of pages,...

The WTO Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA) is a plurilateral Agreement, meaning that it comprises only a subset of the full Membership of the WTO. Currently, a number of WTO Members that are not Parties to the Agreement either are actively seeking accession to it, have commitments to...

Proposing far-reaching reforms to the pension systems, the World Bank has recently suggested that the existing pay-as-you-go pension systems in many rich as well as poor countries, should be replaced by fully funded, mandatory, preferably private pensions as the main pillars of the new system....

This paper concentrates on the trends in peer-reviewed longitudinal panel studies under scientific direction. Household panel studies have succeeded in broadening their disciplinary scope. Numerous innovations such as questions dealing with psychological concepts, and age-specific topical...

Critics of the U.S. health care system frequently point to other countries as models for reform. They point out that many countries spend far less on health care than the United States yet seem to enjoy better health outcomes. The United States should follow the lead of those countries, the...

MDGs are global goals and are powerful tools of international policy because they create a framework of accountability by going beyond stating general objectives and set quantitative, time bound targets against which performance can be measured. This paper challenges the methodology...

States often bargain over objects that affect their future bargaining power. A large territory, for example, is not only valuable in itself, but also as a source of raw material, population and defense. As a result, states not only try to maximize their benefits when they negotiate over the...

This working paper: (i) examines historical and projected government expenditure trends for 189 countries; (ii) reviews the latest IMF country reports for countries to identify the main channels used by governments to adjust expenditures; (iii) discusses the negative social impacts of austerity...

The ability to predict corruption is crucial to policy. Using rich micro-data from Brazil, we show that multiple machine learning models display high levels of performance in predicting municipality-level corruption in public spending. We then quantify which individual municipality features and...