Journal Issue: World Bank Economic Review, Volume 15, Issue 1
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Volume
15
Number
1
Issue Date
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
1564-698X
Journal
World Bank Economic Review
1564-698X
Journal Volume
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Articles
Does Ignoring Heterogeneity in Impacts Distort Project Appraisals? An Experiment for Irrigation in Vietnam
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2001-01) Van de Walle, Dominique; Gunewardena, Dileni
Could the simplifying assumptions made
in project appraisal be so far from the truth that the
expected benefits of public investments are not realized?
Using data for Vietnam, commonly used estimates of the
benefits from irrigation investments based on means are
compared with impacts assessed through an econometric
modeling of marginal returns that allows for household and
area heterogeneity using integrated household-level survey
data. The simpler method performs well in estimating average
benefits nationally but can be misleading for some regions,
and, by ignoring heterogeneity, it overestimates gains to
the poor and underestimates gains to the rich. At moderate
to high cost levels, ignoring heterogeneity in impacts
results in enough mistakes to eliminate the net benefits
from public investment. When irrigating as little as 3
percent of Vietnam's non-irrigated land, the savings
from the more data-intensive method are sufficient to cover
the full cost of the extra data required, ignoring other
benefits from that data.
New Tools in Comparative Political Economy : The Database of Political Institutions
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2001-01) Clarke, George; Beck, Thorsten; Groff, Alberto; Keefer, Philip; Walsh, Patrick
This article introduces a large new
cross-country database, the database of political
institutions. It covers 177 countries over 21 years,
1975-95. The article presents the intuition, construction,
and definitions of the different variables. Among the novel
variables introduced are several measures of checks and
balances, tenure and stability, identification of party
affiliation with government or opposition, and fragmentation
of opposition and government parties in the legislature.
Multi-Tier Targeting of Social Assistance : The Role of Intergovernmental Transfers
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2001-01) Alderman, Harold
Albania provides a small amount of
social assistance to nearly 20 percent of its population
through a system that allows some community discretion in
determining distribution. This study investigates how well
this social assistance program is targeted to the poor.
Relative to other safety net programs in low-income
countries, social assistance in Albania is fairly well
targeted. Nevertheless, the system is hampered by the
absence of a clear, objective criterion to determine the
size of the grants from the central government to communes
as well as limited information that could be used to
implement this criterion. Substantial gains in targeting
could be achieved if the central government better allocated
transfers to local governments, even holding local targeting
at base levels.
Flight Capital as a Portfolio Choice
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2001-01) Collier, Paul; Hoeffler, Anke; Pattillo, Catherine
This article sets flight capital in the
context of portfolio choice, focusing on the proportion of
private wealth that is held abroad. There are large regional
differences in this proportion, ranging from 5 percent in
South Asia to 40 percent in Africa. The authors explain
cross-country differences in portfolio choice using
variables that proxy differences in the risk-adjusted rate
of return on capital. They apply the results to three policy
issues: how the East Asian crisis affected domestic capital
outflows; the effect of the International Monetary
Fund-World Bank debt relief initiative for heavily indebted
poor countries on capital repatriation; and why so much of
Africa's private wealth is held outside the continent.
The Impact of Early Childhood Nutritional Status on Cognitive Development : Does the Timing of Malnutrition Matter?
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2001-01) Glewwe, Paul; King, Elizabeth M.
This article uses longitudinal data from
the Philippines to examine whether the timing of
malnutrition in early childhood is a critical factor in
determining subsequent cognitive development. Although some
observers have argued that the first six months of life are
the most critical in the sense that malnutrition during that
time period harms cognitive development more than
malnutrition later in life, analysis of the Philippines data
does not support this claim. To the contrary, the data
suggest that malnutrition in the second year of life may
have a larger negative impact than malnutrition in the first
year of life.
The Mystery of the Vanishing Benefits : An Introduction to Impact Evaluation
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2001-01) Ravallion, Martin
This article provides an introduction to
the concepts and methods of impact evaluation. The author
provides an intuitive explanation in the context of a
concrete application. The article takes the form of a short
story about a fictional character's on-the-job training
in evaluation. Ms. Speedy analyst is an economist in the
Ministry of Finance in the fictional country of Labas. In
the process of figuring out how to evaluate a human resource
program targeted to the poor, Ms. Analyst learns the
strengths and weaknesses of the main methods of ex post
impact evaluation.
Circumstance and Choice : The Role of Initial Conditions and Policies in Transition Economies
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2001-01) de Melo, Martha; Denizer, Cevdet; Gelb, Alan; Tenev, Stoyan
This article takes an integrated
approach to evaluating the interaction of initial
conditions, political change, reforms and economic
performance in a unified framework covering 28 transition
economies in East Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, and the
Former Soviet Union (FSU). Initial conditions and economic
policy jointly determine the large differences in economic
performance among transition economies. Initial conditions
dominate in explaining inflation, but economic
liberalization is the most important factor determining
differences in growth. Political reform emerges as the most
important determinant of the speed and comprehensiveness of
economic liberalization, raising the important question of
what determines political liberalization. Results suggest
the importance of the level of development in determining
the decision to expand political freedoms.