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16,882 records were found.
This study tests two opposing hypotheses
about the impact of aid fragmentation on the practice of aid
tying. In one, when a small number of donors dominate the
aid market in a country, they may exploit their monopoly
power by tying more aid to purchases from contractors based
in their own countries. Alternatively, when donors have a
larger share of the aid market, they may have stronger
incentives to maximize the development impact of their aid
by tying less of it. Empirical tests strongly and
consistently support the latter hypothesis. The key finding
-- that higher donor aid shares are associated with less aid
tying -- is robust to recipient controls, donor fixed
effects and instr...
This paper contributes new evidence from
two large household surveys on the compliance of firms with
severance pay regulations in Indonesia, and the extent to
which changes in severance pay regulations could affect
employment rigidity. Compliance appears to be low, as only
one-third of workers entitled to severance pay report
receiving it, and on average workers only collect 40 percent
of the payment due to them. Eligible female and low-wage
workers are least likely to report receiving payments.
Widespread non-compliance is consistent with trends in
employment rigidity, which remained essentially unchanged
following the large increases in severance mandated by the
2003 law. These re...
The main general objective of this study
is to promote a deeper understanding of municipal finance in
the West Bank and Gaza, including identification of the key
issues that local governments currently face. The paper
discusses the policy implications associated with its main
findings as potential policy options for future decision
making on local government reforms. As such, this study aims
at facilitating the process for a future policy dialogue
between the World Bank and the Palestinian Authority (PA) or
Ministry of Local Government (MoLG). Furthermore, it is
expected that the identification of the main issues,
together with their policy implications, may assist the PA
or MoLG in...
Romania, along with many other countries
in the European Union, faces daunting fiscal challenges.
Fiscal balances deteriorated sharply following the global
economic crisis, forcing Romania to implement a fiscal
consolidation that was one of the largest in the European
Union, but which may not be sustainable without a recovery
of economic growth. Although the ratio of public debt to
gross domestic product is still relatively modest, at around
35 percent, long-term fiscal solvency is threatened by the
costs of funding the public pension system in the face of
adverse demographic shifts over the next 50 years. Because
of widespread tax evasion, the tax system in Romania is one
of the le...
This strategy for making development
Climate-Resilient in Sub-Saharan Africa is the World
Bank's operational response to climate variability and
change on the continent. Grounded in a climate risk review
of the Africa Region's sustainable development
portfolio, it adds the climate change dimension to the
Region's development strategy and business plan, the
Africa Action Plan (AAP, 2009-2012), and will be an integral
part of the AAP in the future. The AAP and the climate
change strategy are a sound and realistic framework for
climate-resilient development in Sub-Saharan Africa. The
strategy is based on the premise that increased climate
variability threatens the development gains of ...
This paper proposes two new indices of
relative deprivation, derived from an extension of the
concept of the generalized Gini for the measurement of
distributional change. Population- and income-weighted
relative deprivation indices are then defined and, using
panel data from the Consortium of Household Panels for
European Socio-Economic Research, this paper checks which of
the various ways of defining individual deprivation best
fits the answers given by individuals on the degree of their
satisfaction with income. The analysis finds that the
deprivation indices proposed are consistently and negatively
correlated with income satisfaction as reported by
respondents, that income weigh...
This paper examines two sources of
global knowledge spillovers: foreign direct investments and
trade. Empirical evidence demonstrates that foreign direct
investment and trade can contribute to overall domestic
productivity growth only when the technology gap between
domestic and foreign firms is not too large and when a
sufficient absorptive capacity is available in domestic
firms. The paper proposes the terms research and development
and labor quality to capture the innovative and absorptive
capacity of the country. The spillover effects in
productivity are analyzed using a stochastic frontier
approach. This productivity (in terms of total factor
productivity) is decomposed using a...
Global commodity markets are affected by
a variety of government policies that may expand or lower
overall supply and as a result affect world prices for the
specific products concerned. Market failures and market
structures (market power along the value chain) also affect
supply. This paper briefly reviews a number of factors that
may distort international commodity markets with a view to
identifying elements of an agenda for multilateral
cooperation to reduce such distortions. Much of the policy
agenda that arises is domestic and requires action by
national governments. But numerous policies -- or absence of
policy -- generate international spillovers that call for
the negotiation...
Why are emerging economies excessively
vulnerable to shocks to external funding? What was the role
of financial flows from emerging to developed economies in
setting the stage for the subprime crisis? This paper
addresses these questions in a simple general equilibrium
framework that emphasizes the aggregate implications of the
misallocation of funds on the micro level. The analysis
shows that the misallocation of funds amplifies volatility
even in a closed economy. Financial integration between
relatively distorted emerging economies and relatively
undistorted developed economies leads to a further
divergence in volatility, thereby providing a new and simple
explanation for the div...
This rapid assessment was conducted for
the Thailand Ministry of Public Health with the support of
the World Bank in partnership with the Thailand
International Health Policy Program and the Thailand Health
Systems Research Institute. This work was done under the
World Bank's Country Development Partnership Agreement
with the Government of Thailand. Thailand's health
system has some features that lead to complexity and local
variation in the scope of health responsibilities of Health
care (HCs) and the accountabilities and incentives of HCs
before and after devolution. HC staff and Tambon
Administrative Organization (TAO) leaders in three of the
devolved health centers (Naphu, Salab...
