Almost every country exhibits two important health financing trends: health spending per person rises and the share of out-of-pocket spending on health services declines. We describe these trends as a “health financing transition” to provide a conceptual framework for understanding health...

In recent years, the interdisciplinary nature of global health has blurred the lines between medicine and social science. As medical journals publish non-experimental research articles on social policies or macro-level interventions, controversies have arisen when social scientists have...

Healthcare services are more widespread in Latin America and the Caribbean today than 50 years ago, yet this availability is not necessarily reflected in popular perceptions. This study documents the expansion of healthcare services in the Region in terms of medically-trained professionals,...

Global health aid is exceedingly complex. It encompasses more than one hundred bilateral agencies, global funds, and independent initiatives that interact with an equally complex and diverse set of institutions involved in financing and providing health care in developing countries. Numerous...

Results-based approaches (RBA) are becoming increasingly important, in both developed and developing countries. Within the energy sector, there are already several large-scale results-based schemes that make payments to implementers and service providers. However, support to national or regional...

"Red flags" are indicators of potential issues regarding governance failure, collusion or corruption in projects. While some specific red flags can be powerful indicators of issues to be addressed, the hypothesis of this paper is that many proposed red flags are potentially too ubiquitous and...

Construction governance failures can lead to the construction of the wrong infrastructure, poor quality construction, and excessively high prices for work. There is some evidence from both other sectors and the construction sector itself that improved transparency, especially when combined with...

A number of recent survey articles express hope that new data from enterprise surveys would shed new light on corruption complementing the corruption perception index by Transparency International. The paper explores this using the World Bank's Enterprise Survey data globally and not just the...

Governance is central to development outcomes in infrastructure, not least because corruption (a symptom of failed governance) can have significantly negative impact on returns to infrastructure investment. This conclusion holds whether infrastructure is in private or public hands. This paper...

The construction industry accounts for about one-third of gross capital formation. Governments have major roles as clients, regulators, and owners of construction companies. The industry is consistently ranked as one of the most corrupt: large payments to gain or alter contracts and circumvent...