Impact evaluation has grown more popular as a method for identifying the causal links between interventions and outcomes. These kind of evaluations assess changes that can be attributed to a ...particular intervention. Both innovations in statistical methods and the demand for evaluations that can measure such development results are increasing. The World Bank Group is the largest producer of impact evaluations among all development institutions. Thus, IEG has evaluated the relevance, quality, and influence of World Bank and IFC impact evaluations. IEG finds that the World Bank Group portfolio of impact evaluations is largely aligned with sector strategies and project objectives. Selection and coordination of impact evaluations has been improving. Most World Bank impact evaluations meet either medium or high quality standards, and about half of IFC impact evaluations did. Issues related to funding, staff capacity, and incentives, however, constrain the scope and coverage of impact evaluations in the Bank Group. IEG makes five recommendations to strengthen the Bank Groups impact evaluation efforts, revolving around consistency, coordination, quality standards, and ensuring operational relevance. Both development and evaluation professionals will find valuable lessons in this evaluation. There are real benefits from impact evaluations, including their influence on development practices through contributions to project assessment and design of future projects. Thus, development practitioners engaged in designing projects, evaluators interestedin using similar methodology, and the general evaluation community will be able to use the lessons IEG sets out in this report.
Robert McNamara is best known for his key role in the escalation of the Vietnam War as U.S. secretary of defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. The familiar story begins with ...the brilliant young executive transforming Ford Motor Company, followed by his rise to political power under Kennedy, and culminating in his downfall after eight years of failed military policies. Many believe McNamara's fall from grace after Vietnam marked the end of his career. They were wrong.In Robert McNamara's Other War, Patrick Allan Sharma reveals the previously untold story of what happened next. As president of the World Bank from 1968 to 1981, McNamara changed the way many people thought about international development by shifting the World Bank's focus to poverty alleviation. Though his efforts to redeem himself after his failures in Vietnam were well-intentioned, Sharma argues, his expansion of the World Bank's agenda contributed to a decline in the quality of its activities. McNamara's policies at the Bank also helped lay the groundwork for the economic crises that have plagued the developing world during the past three decades.Not only has Sharma crafted an engaging chronicle of one of the most enigmatic figures in modern American history; he has also produced one of the first detailed histories of the World Bank. He mines previously unstudied Bank documents that have only recently become available to researchers as well as material from archives on three continents. Sharma's extensive research shows that McNamara's influence extended well beyond Vietnam and that his World Bank years may be his most enduring legacy.
Prior research suggests that firm productivity and export activity are mutually reinforcing. Highly productive firms are more likely to enter the export market (i.e., self-selection), and upon doing ...so, achieve greater productivity levels over time (i.e., learning-by-exporting). We consider how a critical yet unexamined, factor impacts this relationship: the economic development of a firm’s home market. Drawing on institution-based theories, we hypothesize that self-selection effects will be strongest among firms in
more
developed economies. Drawing on knowledge-based theories, we hypothesize that learning-by-exporting effects will be strongest among firms in
less
developed economies. Taken together, we posit that firm productivity and export activity indeed reinforce one another; however, the strength of each direction of the relationship will be amplified, at least in part, by the presence of the
opposite
home-market economic conditions. Analysis of longitudinal data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys composed of responses from 3431 manufacturing firms across 63 countries from 2006 to 2017 supports the proposed hypotheses.
Foreign direct investment and private capital flows are highly concentrated geographically, with almost half of them reaching the top five destinations. These flows tend to evade many high-risk ...countries, with the exception of those directed to extractive industries. Regulatory and contractual risks, particularly in infrastructure, have inhibited investments in many parts of the developing world. A core objective of the World Bank Group (WBG) has been to support the flow of private investment for development; guarantees and insurance have been among the instruments that the Group has used to pursue this objective.This evaluation assesses the effectiveness in the use of guarantee and insurance products by the WBG. It finds that these instruments have effectively advanced WBG strategic objectives, in particular facilitating the flow of private investment to high-risk sectors and countries. The diverse range of these instruments has helped to meet the demand for risk mitigation under a variety of circumstances. The Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, (MIGA), a relatively small institution of 100 staff, has issued 17 billion in guarantees and meets a gap in the provision of political risk insurance that private providers are unable to meet. The World Banks partial risk guarantee has supported large and complex public-private partnership infrastructure projects in high-risk countries. Its partial credit guarantees have introduced countries to commercial markets or reintroduced them following a crisis. The International Finance Corporations (IFC) guarantee instruments have led its entry in the market for local currency finance and have helped improve access to finance for underserved market segments.
The effectiveness and efficiency of a country's public sector is vital to the success of development activities, including those the World Bank supports. Sound financial management, an efficient ...civil service and administrative policy, efficient and fair collection of taxes, and transparent operations that are relatively free of corruption all contribute to good delivery of public services. The Bank has devoted an increasing share of its lending and advisory support to the reform of central governments, so it is important to understand what is working, what needs improvement, and what is missing. IEG has examined lending and other kinds of Bank support in 1999-2006 for public sector reform in four areas: public financial management, administrative and civil service, revenue administration, and anticorruption and transparency.Although a majority of countries that borrowed to support public sector reform experienced improved performance in some dimensions, there were shortcomings in important areas and in overall coordination. The frequency of improvement was higher among IBRD borrowers than among IDA borrowers. Performance usually improved for public financial management, tax administration, and transparency, but did not usually with respect to civil service. Direct measures to reduce corruption such as anticorruption laws and commissions rarely succeeded.
This paper investigates macro and micro correlates of aid-financed development project outcomes, using data from over 6000 World Bank projects evaluated between 1983 and 2011. Country-level “macro” ...measures of the quality of policies and institutions are strongly correlated with project outcomes, consistent with the view that country-level performance matters for aid effectiveness. However, a striking feature of the data is that the success of individual development projects varies much more within countries than it does between countries. A large set of project-level “micro” variables, including project size, project length, the effort devoted to project preparation and supervision, and early-warning indicators that flag problematic projects during the implementation stage, accounts for some of this within-country variation in project outcomes. Measures of World Bank project manager quality also matter significantly for the ultimate project outcomes. We discuss the implications of these findings for donor policies aimed at aid effectiveness.
The purpose of the present study is to investigate the link among CO2 emissions, energy consumption, gross domestic product, and trade liberalization as related to Kuwait. The study used annual data, ...starting from 1971 to 2017, which was obtained from a world development indicator of the World Bank. For the empirical analysis, the study adopted Augmented Dicky Fuller and Phillips-Perron methods to review stationarity among the data sets. Their results explained a mixed trend, some variables followed the I (1) process, and few are I (0). Based on the findings, a well-defined Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model was applied to the data sets and the outcome was in support of the long and short-run relationship between variables. Carbon dioxide and energy consumption accelerate economic growth; an increase in CO2 emission also plays a significant role in increasing energy consumption. Furthermore, the Granger Causality test shows evidence of bi-directional causality existing between CO2 emissions and energy consumption. A unidirectional causality is running from the gross domestic product to CO2 emissions and energy consumption to trade liberalization.
•Carbon dioxide and energy consumption accelerate economic growth; an increase in CO2 emission also rise energy consumption.•Evidence of bi-directional causality existing between CO2 emissions and energy consumption.•One way causality is running from the gross domestic product to CO2 emissions and energy consumption to trade liberalization.•Outcomes of Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model are in support of the long and short-run relationship between variables.
As the world turns against international institutions, this article reviews evidence of the corrupting of global organizations. The review focuses on three international organizations that emerged ...from World War II: the Bretton Woods institutions the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank and the United Nations (UN). The article explores evidence of major shareholders (mainly the United States) using the Bretton Woods institutions to funnel money and other favors to strategically preferred countries. Then the review discusses vote buying across a range of issues debated at the UN and finally turns to dark scholarship on the use of UN human rights institutions by autocratic states as a veil to violate those very rights. The article concludes that government pursuit of strategic objectives may be a necessary part of global cooperation, but scholarship should continue to delve into the micro foundations underlying the macro evidence presented here to better inform reformers on how to limit corrupting influences.
Measuring the World Merry, Sally Engle
Current anthropology,
04/2011, Volume:
52, Issue:
S3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Indicators are rapidly multiplying as tools for assessing and promoting a variety of social justice and reform strategies around the world. There are indicators of rule of law, indicators of violence ...against women, and indicators of economic development, among many others. Indicators are widely used at the national level and are increasingly important in global governance. There are increasing demands for “evidence-based” funding for nongovernmental organizations and for the results of civil society organizations to be quantifiable and measurable. The reliance on simplified numerical representations of complex phenomena began in strategies of national governance and economic analysis and has recently migrated to the regulation of nongovernmental organizations and human rights. The turn to indicators in the field of global governance introduces a new form of knowledge production with implications for relations of power between rich and poor nations and between governments and civil society. The deployment of statistical measures tends to replace political debate with technical expertise. The growing reliance on indicators provides an example of the dissemination of the corporate form of thinking and governance into broader social spheres.
Leading international organisations presently argue that a transition to 'climate-smart agriculture' (CSA) is an obligatory task to ensure food supply for an anticipated nine billion people by 2050. ...Despite the rubric's newfound importance, the conceptual underpinnings of CSA are often left unclear. Focusing on the World Bank's framework, this paper critically interrogates the principles and concepts that underpin CSA. It argues that while CSA provides greater policy space for more holistic approaches to agriculture, it nonetheless operates within an apolitical framework that is narrowly focused on technical fixes at the level of production. This depoliticised approach to the global food system tends to validate existing policy agendas and minimise questions concerning power, inequality and access. By highlighting four strong tensions that permeate the CSA framework, the paper extols the need to greatly widen the scope of debate. To this end, it proposes an alternative 'climate-wise' framework to foreground the inherently political dimensions of food and agriculture in an era of climatic change.
PDF
