The rural non-farm sector plays an important role in diversifying income for rural households in developing countries and has the potential to emerge as a major source of employment. In some cases it has outgrown the agricultural sector, in part due to the expansion of credit through...

Informal employment accounts for more than half of total employment in Latin America and the Caribbean, and an even higher percentage in Africa and South Asia. It is associated with lack of social insurance, low tax collection, and low productivity jobs. Lowering payroll taxes is a potential...

In the last decades, many developing countries abandoned their existing policy regimes and adopted inflation targeting (IT) by which they aimed to control inflation through the use of policy interest rates. During the period before the crisis, most of these countries experienced large...

Much of the information relevant to policy formulation for industrial development is held by the private sector, not by public officials. There is, therefore, fairly broad agreement in the development literature that some form of structured engagement - often referred to as close or strategic...

A huge literature shows that childhood health and educational attainment are highly correlated. However, estimates for the effect of childhood health on educational attainment under risk generally confound the effect of liquidity constraints and of lack of insurance against risk. It is unclear...

This paper analyses how age at immigration to Sweden and getting a first foothold in the labor market is related. We estimate hazard rate models using registry data on all persons who arrived in each of the years 1990, 1994, 1998, and 2002. The results show that the number of years taken to get...

Qualitative case studies suggest that the outcomes of tax treaty negotiations are determined by power politics and negotiating capability. In contrast, quantitative studies have tended to depart from a model that implies absolute gains, full rationality, and perfect information on the part of...

Overview: World Development Report 2017: Governance and the Law. Part I: Rethinking governance for development: A conceptual framework. Chapter 1: Governance for development: The challenges. Chapter 2: Enhancing government for development: Why policies fail. Chapter 3: The role of law. Part II:...

Staatliche Zahlungsausfälle haben nicht selten politische Ursachen. Während ökonomische Rahmenbedingungen wie etwa Wirtschaftswachstum, Finanzstabilität oder globale Investorenstimmungen die Zahlungsfähigkeit eines Staates beeinflussen, wird die tatsächliche Rückzahlung von Staatsschulden...

Around the world, no bigger policy challenge preoccupies leaders than expanding social participation in the process and benefits of economic growth. The report, which covers 109 economies, seeks to improve our understanding of how countries can use a diverse spectrum of policy incentives and...