03. Journals

2,963 items available

Permanent URI for this collection

http://hdl.handle.net/10986/2210

These are journal articles published in World Bank journals as well as externally by World Bank authors.

Sub-collections of this Collection

Items in this collection

Now showing 1 - 10 of 10

The Impact of Financial Literacy Training for Migrants

(Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2014-01-23) Gibson, John ; McKenzie, David ; Zia, Bilal

Remittances are a major source of external financing for many developing countries, but the cost of sending them remains high in many migration corridors. Despite efforts to lower these costs by offering new products and developing cost-comparison information sources, many new and promising inexpensive remittance methods have relatively low adoption rates. The lack of financial literacy among migrants has been identified as one potentially important barrier to competition and new product adoption. This paper presents the results of a randomized experiment designed to measure the impact of providing financial literacy training to migrants. Training appears to increase financial knowledge and information-seeking behavior and reduces the risk of switching to costlier remittance products, but it does not result in significant changes in the frequency of remitting or in the remitted amount.
Zombie Economics : How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us

( 2011-04) Quiggin, John

John Quiggin is an Australian economist and professor at the University of Queensland. He has also held academic positions at the Australian National University and James Cook University. Best known for his work on utility theory, Quiggin is among the top 500 economists in the world according to IDEA S/RePEc. Quiggin authors an Australian blog, and is a regular contributor to Crooked Timber. He also writes a fortnightly column in The Australian Financial Review.
Pathways To Development : What We Know and Don't Know

( 2011-04) Nallari, Raj

Sixty years of development experience tells us that the pathways to development are varied, guided by different visions, different strategies, and different definitions of progress. If sustained growth is the measure, then progress has also been mixed. Between 1990 and 2008, the developing economies have grown nearly twice as fast on average as the developed countries. But over the past six decades, only a dozen countries have sustained their growth for twenty years or more because of frequent shocks, redistributive conflicts, and difficulty in sustaining reform efforts over time.
South Meets South : Enriching the Development Menu

( 2010-10) Maruri, Enrique ; Fraeters, Han

African countries, like Nigeria, with an emerging information technology (IT) industry, are examples of how globalization has opened up vast new opportunities. Information technology and business process outsourcing is a multibillion dollar talent-driven industry with a market that is still untapped. Africa is keen on exploring this new frontier which has the potential to create thousands of quality jobs for its young people. But to do so, it must nurture the right skills. Where can these be found?
Helping Latin America Help Itself : South-South Cooperation as an Innovative Development Tool

( 2010-10) Cox, Pamela

Even before the massive earthquake struck Haiti early this year, the country was one of the biggest beneficiaries of South-South cooperation in the Americas. In fact, since 2004, the first UN peacekeeping mission made up mostly of South American forces has been serving in the beleaguered Caribbean nation.
On Analyzing the World Distribution of Income

(World Bank, 2010-02-15) Atkinson, Anthony B. ; Brandolini, Andrea

Consideration of world inequality should cause reexamination of the key concepts underlying the welfare approach to measuring income inequality and its relation to measuring poverty. This reexamination leads to exploration of a new measure that allows poverty and inequality to be considered in the same framework, incorporates different approaches to measuring inequality, and allows varied expressions of the cost of inequality. Applied to the world distribution of income for 1820–1992, the new measure provides different perspectives on the evolution of global inequality.
Agricultural Employment Trends in Asia and Africa

(World Bank, 2010-02-01) Headey, Derek ; Bezemer, Dirk ; Hazell, Peter B.

Contrary to conventional economic theories, the relationship between income growth and agricultural employment is extremely diverse, even among regions starting from similar levels of development, such as Asia and Africa. Due to its labor-intensive Green Revolution and strong farm–nonfarm linkages, Asia's development path is mostly characterized by fast growth with relatively slow agricultural exits. In contrast to Asia, urban biased policies, low rural population density, and high rates of population growth have led a number of African countries down a path of slow economic growth with surprisingly rapid agricultural exits. Despite this divergence both continents now face daunting employment problems. Asia appears to be increasingly vulnerable to rising inequality, slower job creation, and shrinking farm sizes, suggesting that Asian governments need to refocus on integrating smallholders and lagging regions into increasingly commercialized rural and urban economies. Africa, in contrast, has yet to achieve its own Green Revolution, which would still be a highly effective tool for job creation and poverty reduction. However, the diversity of its endowments and its tighter budget constraints mean that agricultural development strategies in Africa need to be highly context specific, financially sustainable, and more evidence-based.
Trade Openness Is Now More Important Than Ever

(World Bank, 2009-12-01) Krueger, Anne O.

Protectionism constitutes a double threat. It can make recovery from the recession slower and reduce the growth potential of the international economy once recovery has taken hold.
Agricultural Growth and Poverty Reduction

(World Bank, 2009-11-30) de Janvry, Alain ; Sadoulet, Elisabeth

Agricultural growth has long been recognized as an important instrument for poverty reduction. Yet, measurements of this relationship are still scarce and not always reliable. The authors present additional evidence at both the sectoral and household levels based on recent data. Results show that rural poverty reduction has been associated with growth in yields and in agricultural labor productivity, but that this relation varies sharply across regional contexts. GDP growth originating in agriculture induces income growth among the 40 percent poorest, which is on the order of three times larger than growth originating in the rest of the economy. The power of agriculture comes not only from its direct poverty reduction effect but also from its potentially strong growth linkage effects on the rest of the economy. Decomposing the aggregate decline in poverty into a rural contribution, an urban contribution, and a population shift component shows that rural areas contributed more than half the observed aggregate decline in poverty. Finally, using the example of Vietnam, the authors show that rapid growth in agriculture has opened pathways out of poverty for farming households. While the effectiveness of agricultural growth in reducing poverty is well established, the effectiveness of public investment in inducing agricultural growth is still incomplete and conditional on context.
Decentralizing Eligibility for a Federal Antipoverty Program

(World Bank, 2009-02-28) Ravallion, Martin

In theory, the informational advantage of decentralizing the eligibility criteria for a federal antipoverty program could come at a large cost to the program's performance in reaching the poor nationally. Whether this happens in practice depends on the size of the local-income effect on the eligibility cutoffs. China's Di Bao program provides a case study. Poorer municipalities adopt systematically lower thresholds—roughly negating intercity differences in need for the program and generating considerable horizontal inequity, so that poor families in rich cities fare better. The income effect is not strong enough to undermine the program's overall poverty impact; other factors, including incomplete coverage of those eligible, appear to matter more.