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WORKING PAPERS
March 21, 2024
Since 2011, the World Bank’s education strategy has emphasized the need to shift focus from schooling to learning, and towards primary education with special attention to foundational skills. But this shift is not always easy to see in the actual lending data. Coding new details on 25 years of World...
WORKING PAPERS
November 27, 2023
International financial institutions (IFIs) appear to agree that quality of policymaking sees gains from diversifying the body of policymakers, all issuing diversity, equity, and inclusion statements. But how do these institutions perform when it comes to their own staff— do they lead by example? We...
WORKING PAPERS
October 11, 2023
Many countries are facing a much harsher budgetary prospect than a few years ago. For low- and middle-income countries in particular, domestic health expenditure is expected to plateau or contract (in real terms) for many until 2027, development assistance for health has already plateaued, and a deb...
WORKING PAPERS
April 25, 2023
This paper examines the link between ministerial continuity in borrower governments and the performance of World Bank education projects implemented between 2000 and 2017 in 114 countries. I use a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to trace the link between number of ministers durin...
WORKING PAPERS
September 29, 2021
This paper describes the rise and fall of privatization in the World Bank as a means to improve the performance of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in its client countries. While acknowledging that privatization was far more difficult than anticipated to implement correctly, particularly in low-income...
WORKING PAPERS
October 12, 2020
We compile a new data set, combining official sources with transaction-level records scraped from the World Bank website, spanning all commitments, disbursements, and payments on all World Bank loans from before the 2008-09 Global Financial Crisis through August 2020, allowing us to compare the...
WORKING PAPERS
March 30, 2020
There is a little-noticed but important difference between the World Bank’s original goal for poverty reduction and the subsequent UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG). While both target the “$1.90 a day” poverty rate, the Bank’s goal was a 3% rate by 2030, while the SDG is to “eradicate” poverty b...