How do entrepreneurs learn whether they have what it takes to manage larger businesses? It's likely through experimentation. In this paper, Dean Karlan, Ryan Knight, and Christopher Udry develop a model to help understand the impediments to experimentation and the benefits to giving it a try.

This paper details that results of an experiment in northern Ghana in which small-scale farmers were randomly given different kinds of potentially risk-reducing assistance.

Ghana’s rapid economic growth and the recent GDP rebasing exercise put Ghana suddenly above the income limit for IDA eligibility. This paper considers the implications of the country’s new middle-income status.

The authors assess the World Bank’s private sector interventions in African fragile states. They summarize and analyze project-level data from IDA, IFC, and MIGA, and introduce a new framework which may assist in the design and implementation of projects in fragile states.

In this report, Benjamin Leo, Vijaya Ramachandran, and Ross Thuotte assess the bank’s private-sector interventions in African fragile states. They summarize and analyze project-level data from IDA, IFC, and MIGA, and introduce a new framework to assist in the design and implementation of projects i...

Jacob Hughes, Amanda Glassman, and Walter Gwenigale discuss the design, opportunities, and limitations of the of Liberia Health Sector Pool Fund.

With the Doha Round dead if not buried, the United States has no excuse for not acting on its rhetoric and providing improved market access for all of the world’s least developed countries.