Policy-oriented discussions often assume that"better targeting"implies larger impacts on poverty or more cost-effective interventions. The literature on the economics of targeting warns against that assumption, but evidence has been scarce. The paper begins with a critical review of the...

What factors influence community participation in the delivery of urban services? In particular, does security of tenure enhance the probability of participation as it provides individuals with incentives to act collectively in pursuit of a common objective? And are collective efforts less...

Cote d'Ivoire represents an ideal opportunity for a case study of the effects of fiscal policy in a developing country with a fixed exchange rate. For the last 15 years, the growth of the Ivorian economy has been dramatically affected by both exogenous factors and the responses of fiscal policy....

Low and highly volatile growth define Africa's growth experience. But there is no evidence that growth volatility is associated to long term economic performance. This result may be misleading if it suggests that volatility is not important for economic and social progress. In this paper we use...

The authors explorethe labor dynamics of Russian enterprise restructuring, empirically assessing how patterns of job creation and destruction are related to various aspects of enterprise restructuring across firms in different sectors and regions, and to different forms, sizes, vintages, and...

Most existing estimates of the macroeconomic costs of AIDS, as measured by the reduction in thegrowth rate of gross domestic product, are modest. For Africa-the continent where the epidemic has hit the hardest-they range between 0.3 and 1.5 percent annually. The reason is that these estimates...

Using data from Indonesia, Newhouse and Beegle to evaluate the impact of school type on academic achievement of junior secondary school students (grades 7-9). Students that graduate from public junior secondary schools, controlling for a variety of other characteristics, score 0.15 to 0.3...

The authors provide a general equilibrium model for analyzing the mechanisms by which macroeconomic, trade, price, and exchange rate policies affect agricultural export sectors. They estimate the model empirically for Tanzania and Malawi to measure the supply responses of agricultural...

The extent of bureaucracy varies extensively across countries, but the quality of bureaucracy within a country changes more slowly than economic policies. The authors propose that the quality of bureaucracy may be an important structural determinant of open economy macroeconomic policies -...

This report is part of an attempt to model the global markets for primary commodities and to use these models for forecasting purposes as well as for policy analysis. In a free market, domestic prices on agricultural products could be expected to vary with world prices. But intervention is so...