Research

Official development assistance (ODA) is at a crossroads, and reform is needed to balance the original mission of poverty reduction with the growing demands of global challenges such as climate change. While there is broad agreement on the need to clarify ODA’s purpose, modernise its governance fram...

Some miracles resist forgetting. They continue to hold out hope for believers. The East Asian Miracle that apparently blessed four economies with a growth bonanza in the last quarter of the twentieth century, endures because a legion of countries believe that supernatural events can be made to recur...

Facing major fiscal and balance-of-payments headwinds, Ghana embarked on a comprehensive restructuring of its sovereign debt in December 2022.It was assessed that to return to sustainability, Ghana’s public debt should decline from nearly 90 percent of GDP to 55 percent of GDP with significant debt ...

Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Rwanda, and Senegal invest less than 0.2 percent of GDP and about 2 percent of their education budgets on pre-primary education, below international recommendations. We recommend policies to enhance transparency, prioritize early childhood funding, and use international aid to ...

After decades of research and development, two new malaria vaccines entered routine administration this year, and are projected to save 180,000 children’s lives by 2030. But under current plans, roughly 2.5 million children will die of malaria unvaccinated over the same period. What’s stopping a fas...

Multilateral development banks (MDBs) face significant policy, financial, and operational challenges in fragile and conflict-affected situations (FCS), with the World Bank playing a central role in financing these areas. MDBs have developed strategies to address FCS, but face difficulties in transla...

We study how marriage market considerations influence parental investments in daughters’ education in Pakistan. Using a hypothetical choice methodology, we estimate parents’ preferences and willingness-to-pay for marital customs and daughters’ marital and post-marital outcomes. Our findings highligh...