Relatively few developing countries have established a sustainble capacity for educational monitoring and evaluation. As a result, the efforts of governments and assistance agencies to improve education have been hampered by lack of information on outcomes and costs. World Bank experience with...

Regional integration is on the rise again, despite its apparent failure among developing countries in the past. The authors survey the ambiguous economies of customs unions, emphasizing that the traditional dichotomy between"trade creation"and"trade diversion"is not particularly helpful for...

Tobacco use, which is rising quickly in developing countries, kills 5.4 million people a year worldwide. This paper explores the impacts of mobile phone ownership on tobacco consumption. Indeed, mobile phone ownership could affect tobacco consumption because individuals might pay for their...

Building reliable institutions that support a market system is widely believed to be critical to a successful economic transition. The authors present indicators on the predictability of the institutional framework across twenty transition economies -including indicators of the predictability of...

In recent years an extensive body of literature has emerged on the definition, measurement and analysis of poverty. Much of this literature focuses on analyzing poverty at the national level, or spatial disaggregation by general categories of urban or rural areas with adjustments made for...

The authors estimate the potential commercial benefits that tropical timber producing countries could enjoy by adopting timber certification schemes. Such benefits are crucial for encouraging the supply of certified timber. Timber certification is a reality: various countries and organizations...

Using data from Pakistan's Punjab, the authors examine monopoly power in the market for groundwater - irrigation water extracted using private tubewells - a market characterized by barriers to entry and spatial fragmentation. Simple theory predicts that tubewell owners should price-discriminate...

This paper presents new data from 150 countries showing that former cabinet members, central bank governors, and financial regulators are many orders of magnitude more likely than other citizens to become board members of banks. Countries where the politician-banker phenomenon is more prevalent...

Which public policies and ownership structures enhance the governance of banks? The authors construct a new database on the ownership of banks internationally and then assess the ramifications of ownership, shareholder protection laws, and supervisory and regulatory policies on bank valuations....

Health insurance is one in a portfolio of options that are available to augment government budgetary resources for health-care spending. Yet, little comparative information is available on the kinds of health insurance that are presently extant in sub - Saharan Africa. The purpose of this paper...