World Bank Group
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Research output, citation impact, and the most-cited recent papers from World Bank Group (United States). Aggregated across the NobleBlocks index of 300M+ scholarly works.
Top-cited papers from World Bank Group
Deon Filmer, Lant H. Pritchett, Estimating Wealth Effects without Expenditure Data-or Tears: An Application to Educational Enrollments in States of India, Demography, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Feb., 2001), pp. 115-132
Many countries strive to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) in the hope that knowledge brought by multinationals will spill over to domestic industries and increase their productivity. In contrast with earlier literature that failed to find positive intra-industry spillovers from FDI, this study focuses on effects operating across industries. The analysis, based on a firm-level panel data set from Lithuania, produces evidence consistent with positive productivity spillovers from FDI taking place through contacts between foreign affiliates and their local suppliers in upstream sectors. The data indicate that such spillovers are associated with projects with shared domestic and foreign ownership but not with fully owned foreign investments. There is no indication of spillovers occurring within the same industry or through domestic firms sourcing inputs from multinationals.
Using bank-level data for 80 countries in the years 1988–95, this article shows that differences in interest margins and bank profitability reflect a variety of determinants: bank characteristics, macroeconomic conditions, explicit and implicit bank taxation, deposit insurance regulation, overall financial structure, and underlying legal and institutional indicators. A larger ratio of bank assets to gross domestic product and a lower market concentration ratio lead to lower margins and profits, controlling for differences in bank activity, leverage, and the macroeconomic environment. Foreign banks have higher margins and profits than domestic banks in developing countries, while the opposite holds in industrial countries. Also, there is evidence that the corporate tax burden is fully passed onto bank customers, while higher reserve requirements are not, especially in developing countries.
This paper reports on the 2009 update of \n the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) research project, \n covering 212 countries and territories and measuring six \n dimensions of governance between 1996 and 2008: Voice and \n Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of \n Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory \n Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. These \n aggregate indicators are based on hundreds of specific and \n disaggregated individual variables measuring various \n dimensions of governance, taken from 35 data sources \n provided by 33 different organizations. The data reflect the \n views on governance of public sector, private sector and NGO \n experts, as well as thousands of citizen and firm survey \n respondents worldwide. The authors also explicitly report \n the margins of error accompanying each country estimate. \n These reflect the inherent difficulties in measuring \n governance using any kind of data. They find that even after \n taking margins of error into account, the WGI permit \n meaningful cross-country comparisons as well as monitoring \n progress over time. The aggregate indicators, together with \n the disaggregated underlying indicators, are available at www.govindicators.org.
The environmental Kuznets curve posits an inverted-U relationship between pollution and economic development. Pessimistic critics of empirically estimated curves have argued that their declining portions are illusory, either because they are cross-sectional snapshots that mask a long-run “race to the bottom” in environmental standards, or because industrial societies will continually produce new pollutants as the old ones are controlled. However, recent evidence has fostered an optimistic view by suggesting that the curve is actually flattening and shifting to the left. The driving forces appear to be economic liberalization, clean technology diffusion, and new approaches to pollution regulation in developing countries.
This article introduces a new database of indicators of financial structure and financial development across countries and over time. The database is unique in that it combines a wide variety of indicators that measure the size, activity, and efficiency of financial intermediaries and markets. It improves on previous efforts by presenting data on the public share of commercial banks, introducing indicators of the size and activity of nonbank financial institutions, and constructing measures of the size of bond and primary equity markets.
Six dimensions of governance are estimated covering 199 countries and territories for four periods: 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002. The indicators are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance drawn from 25 data sources constructed by 18 organizations. These individual measures are assigned to categories capturing key dimensions of governance. An unobserved-components model is used to construct six aggregate governance indicators in each of the four periods. Point esti-mates of the dimensions of governance are provided as well as the margins of errors for each country for the four periods. Methodological issues are also addressed, including tests for potential biases, and the interpretation and use of the data, given the estimated margins of errors for the indicators. The data and a Web-based graphical interface are available online at www.worldbank.org/wbi/governance/govdata2002/index.html. This article presents estimates of six dimensions of governance for 199 countries and territories for 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002 developed in the context of an ongoingproject tomeasure governance across countries. Section I describes the data used in developing this round of the governance indicators, which include several new sources. Data sources used in the earlier studies were updated forward to 2002 andbackward to1996, andpreviously estimated indicators for1998and2000were revised to reflect the new data. The aggregation procedure, described in section II, provides not only estimates of governance for each country but alsomeasures of the precision or reliability of these estimates. Although the new data have improved the precision of the governance indicators, themargins of error remain large relative to the units in which governance is measured, so that comparisons across countries and especially over time should be made with caution. Measurement error is not unique to these indicators but is pervasive among all measures of governance and
The authors present the latest update of their aggregate governance indicators, together with new analysis of several issues related to the use of these measures. The governance indicators measure the following six dimensions of governance: (1) voice and accountability; (2) political instability and violence; (3) government effectiveness; (4) regulatory quality; (5) rule of law, and (6) control of corruption. They cover 209 countries and territories for 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004. They are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 37 separate data sources constructed by 31 organizations. The authors present estimates of the six dimensions of governance for each period, as well as margins of error capturing the range of likely values for each country. These margins of error are not unique to perceptions-based measures of governance, but are an important feature of all efforts to measure governance, including objective indicators. In fact, the authors give examples of how individual objective measures provide an incomplete picture of even the quite particular dimensions of governance that they are intended to measure. The authors also analyze in detail changes over time in their estimates of governance; provide a framework for assessing the statistical significance of changes in governance; and suggest a simple rule of thumb for identifying statistically significant changes in country governance over time. The ability to identify significant changes in governance over time is much higher for aggregate indicators than for any individual indicator. While the authors find that the quality of governance in a number of countries has changed significantly (in both directions), they also provide evidence suggesting that there are no trends, for better or worse, in global averages of governance. Finally, they interpret the strong observed correlation between income and governance, and argue against recent efforts to apply a discount to governance performance in low-income countries.
Service quality is increasingly recognised as an important aspect of electronic commerce (e‐commerce). Because the online comparison of the technical features of products is essentially costless, feasible, and easier than comparisons of products through traditional channels, service quality is the key determinant for successful e‐commerce. A conceptual model of the determinants of e‐service quality is proposed and discussed. Given the exploratory nature of this research, focus groups are used to investigate e‐service quality dimensions. It is proposed that e‐service quality has incubative and active dimensions for increasing hit rates, stickiness, and customer retention. The incubative dimension consists of: ease of use, appearance, linkage, structure and layout, and content. The active dimension consists of reliability, efficiency, support, communication, security, and incentives. The importance and implications of each determinant are presented.
How different are Islamic banks from conventional banks? Does the recent crisis justify a closer look at the Sharia-compliant business model for banking? When comparing conventional and Islamic banks, controlling for time-variant country-fixed effects, we find few significant differences in business orientation. There is evidence however, that Islamic banks are less cost-effective, but have a higher intermediation ratio, higher asset quality and are better capitalized. We also find large cross-country variation in the differences between conventional and Islamic banks as well as across Islamic banks of different sizes. Furthermore, we find that Islamic banks are better capitalized, have higher asset quality and are less likely to disintermediate during crises. The better stock performance of listed Islamic banks during the recent crisis is also due to their higher capitalization and better asset quality.<br/><br/>Highlights<br/><br/>► We compare conventional and Islamic banks across 22 countries with both bank types. ► Islamic banks are less efficient, but intermediate more, especially during crises. ► During crises, Islamic banks are better capitalized, with lower loan losses. ► Recent stock performance of Islamic banks due to more capital and lower loan losses.
This paper provides the first analysis \n of the Global Financial Inclusion (Global Findex) Database, \n a new set of indicators that measure how adults in 148 \n economies save, borrow, make payments, and manage risk. The \n data show that 50 percent of adults worldwide have an \n account at a formal financial institution, though account \n penetration varies widely across regions, income groups and \n individual characteristics. In addition, 22 percent of \n adults report having saved at a formal financial institution \n in the past 12 months, and 9 percent report having taken out \n a new loan from a bank, credit union or microfinance \n institution in the past year. Although half of adults around \n the world remain unbanked, at least 35 percent of them \n report barriers to account use that might be addressed by \n public policy. Among the most commonly reported barriers are \n high cost, physical distance, and lack of proper \n documentation, though there are significant differences \n across regions and individual characteristics.
This article describes a new Stata routine, xtcsd, to test for the presence of cross-sectional dependence in panels with many cross-sectional units and few time-series observations. The command executes three different testing procedures—namely, Friedman's ( Journal of the American Statistical Association 32: 675–701) (FR) test statistic, the statistic proposed by Frees ( Journal of Econometrics 69: 393–414), and the cross-sectional dependence (CD) test of Pe-saran ( General diagnostic tests for cross-section dependence in panels [University of Cambridge, Faculty of Economics, Cambridge Working Papers in Economics, Paper No. 0435]). We illustrate the command with an empirical example.
In this paper, we report results from surveys in which enumerators made unannounced visits to primary schools and health clinics in Bangladesh, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Peru and Uganda and recorded whether they found teachers and health workers in the facilities. Averaging across the countries, about 19 percent of teachers and 35 percent of health workers were absent. The survey focused on whether providers were present in their facilities, but since many providers who were at their facilities were not working, even these figures may present too favorable a picture. For example, in India, one-quarter of government primary school teachers were absent from school, but only about one-half of the teachers were actually teaching when enumerators arrived at the schools. We will provide background on education and health care systems in developing; analyze the high absence rates across sectors and countries; investigate the correlates, efficiency, and political economy of teacher and health worker absence; and consider implications for policy.
Historical data are unnecessary to demonstrate that perhaps the basic fact of modern economic history is massive absolute divergence in per capita income across countries. A plausible lower bound on per capita income can be combined with estimates of its current level in the poorer countries to place an upper bound on long-run income growth. Between 1870 and 1990, the ratio of richest to poorest countries' income increased from roughly 9 to 1 to 45 to 1, the standard deviation of (natural log) per capita income doubled, and the average income gap between the richest and all other countries grew nearly tenfold from $1,286 to $12,000.
This paper synthesizes the expanding corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature. We define CSR from an economic perspective and develop a CSR taxonomy that connects disparate approaches to the subject. We explore whether CSR should exist and investigate conditions when CSR may produce higher welfare than other public good provision channels. We also explore why CSR does exist. Here, we integrate theoretical predictions with empirical findings from economic and noneconomic sources. We find limited systematic empirical evidence in favor of CSR mechanisms related to induced innovation, moral hazard, shareholder preferences, or labor markets. In contrast, we uncover consistent empirical evidence in favor of CSR mechanisms related to consumer markets, private politics, and public politics. (JEL D21, L21, M14)
This paper reports on the latest update of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) research project, covering 212 countries and territories and measuring six dimensions of governance between 1996 and 2007: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. The latest aggregate indicators are based on hundreds of specific and disaggregated individual variables measuring various dimensions of governance, taken from 35 data sources provided by 32 different organizations. The data reflect the views on governance of public sector, private sector and NGO experts, as well as thousands of citizen and firm survey respondents worldwide. The authors also explicitly report the margins of error accompanying each country estimate. These reflect the inherent difficulties in measuring governance using any kind of data. The authors also briefly describe the evolution of the WGI since its inception, and show that the margins of error on the aggregate governance indicators have declined over the years, even though they still remain non-trivial. The authors find that even after taking margins of error into account, the WGI permit meaningful cross-country comparisons as well as monitoring progress over time. In less than a decade, a substantial number of countries exhibit statistically significant improvements in at least one dimension of governance, while other countries exhibit deterioration in some dimensions. These aggregate indicators, spanning more than a decade, together with the disaggregated individual indicators, are available at www.govindicators.org
A new data set on national poverty lines is combined with new price data and almost 700 household surveys to estimate absolute poverty measures for the developing world. We find that 25% of the population lived in poverty in 2005, as judged by what "poverty" typically means in the world's poorest countries. This is higher than past estimates. Substantial overall progress is still indicated-the corresponding poverty rate was 52% in 1981-but progress was very uneven across regions. The trends over time and regional profile are robust to various changes in methodology, though precise counts are more sensitive. (c) 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology..
According to official statistics, 20 percent of Uganda's total public expenditure was spent on education in the mid-1990s, most of it on primary education. One of the large public programs was a capitation grant to cover schools' nonwage expenditures. Using panel data from a unique survey of primary schools, we assess the extent to which the grant actually reached the intended end-user (schools). The survey data reveal that during 1991–1995, the schools, on average, received only 13 percent of the grants. Most schools received nothing. The bulk of the school grant was captured by local officials (and politicians). The data also reveal considerable variation in grants received across schools, suggesting that rather than being passive recipients of flows from the government, schools use their bargaining power to secure greater shares of funding. We find that schools in better-off communities managed to claim a higher share of their entitlements. As a result, actual education spending, in contrast to budget allocations, is regressive. Similar surveys in other African countries confirm that Uganda is not a special case.
"The rapid rise in food prices has been a burden on the poor in developing countries, who spend roughly half of their household incomes on food. This paper examines the factors behind the rapid increase in internationally traded food prices since 2002 and estimates the contribution of various factors such as the increased production of biofuels from food grains and oilseeds, the weak dollar, and the increase in food production costs due to higher energy prices. It concludes that the most important factor was the large increase in biofuels production in the U.S. and the EU. Without these increases, global wheat and maize stocks would not have declined appreciably, oilseed prices would not have tripled, and price increases due to other factors, such as droughts, would have been more moderate. Recent export bans and speculative activities would probably not have occurred because they were largely responses to rising prices. While it is difficult to compare the results of this study with those of other studies due to differences in methodologies, time periods and prices considered, many other studies have also recognized biofuels production as a major driver of food prices. The contribution of biofuels to the rise in food prices raises an important policy issue, since much of the increase was due to EU and U.S. government policies that provided incentives to biofuels production, and biofuels policies which subsidize production need to be reconsidered in light of their impact on food prices. "--World Bank web site
OBJECTIVE: There is limited evidence on whether growing mobile phone availability in sub-Saharan Africa can be used to promote high adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART). This study tested the efficacy of short message service (SMS) reminders on adherence to ART among patients attending a rural clinic in Kenya. DESIGN: A randomized controlled trial of four SMS reminder interventions with 48 weeks of follow-up. METHODS: Four hundred and thirty-one adult patients who had initiated ART within 3 months were enrolled and randomly assigned to a control group or one of the four intervention groups. Participants in the intervention groups received SMS reminders that were either short or long and sent at a daily or weekly frequency. Adherence was measured using the medication event monitoring system. The primary outcome was whether adherence exceeded 90% during each 12-week period of analysis and the 48-week study period. The secondary outcome was whether there were treatment interruptions lasting at least 48 h. RESULTS: In intention-to-treat analysis, 53% of participants receiving weekly SMS reminders achieved adherence of at least 90% during the 48 weeks of the study, compared with 40% of participants in the control group (P = 0.03). Participants in groups receiving weekly reminders were also significantly less likely to experience treatment interruptions exceeding 48 h during the 48-week follow-up period than participants in the control group (81 vs. 90%, P = 0.03). CONCLUSION: These results suggest that SMS reminders may be an important tool to achieve optimal treatment response in resource-limited settings.