The World Bank’s evolution roadmap calls for the institution to reform and grow in response to global challenges and in particular climate change. But if the World Bank wants to do more on climate, it will also need to do more on migration–a topic only mentioned in passing. Successive briefings to t...

According to the IDB’s independent evaluation office, only 53 percent of IDB sovereign projects in the latest validation cycle were successful in the four core areas of relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, and sustainability. This falls considerably short when compared to the World Bank's 80 percen...

When a policymaker or donor partner (a “decision maker” for the purposes of this post) poses a policy question—“What’s the best evidence to retain health workers in rural clinics?” “How can we scale an agricultural extension program effectively?” “Was that program to root out school violence success...

To what extent are the high returns on capital of "star firms" due to unmeasured differences in intangible invested capital? Once these differences are corrected, how do star firms differ in their output and investment strategies from other firms? Our evidence points not to exploitation of market po...

More than ever, low and lower middle-income countries (LICs and LMICs) are in a race against time. Their ambition to deliver prosperous economies for their citizens appears continuously thwarted by different shocks. There is a growing sense of urgency among these economies as it becomes clear that t...

I’ve been away for the last couple of Fridays, so this week there is an absolute mass of material to get through this week. I’ve been brutal in editing it down: there are probably ten times as many interesting bits of esoteric statistics, development economics and political commentary from the last ...

The dialogue around World Bank reform proposals has been dominated by Northern voices. But in the last week, representatives of World Bank Group client countries both based in the city and visiting for the World Bank-IMF Spring Meetings have helped to rebalance the discussion.