Publication:
The Role of Justice in Development: The Data Revolution

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Files in English
English PDF (779.48 KB)
1,233 downloads
English Text (184 KB)
109 downloads
Date
2021-06
ISSN
Published
2021-06
Editor(s)
Abstract
This paper summarizes the empirical evidence on the role of justice in economic development, conflict, and trust in institutions. It finds that justice institutions play a significant role in economic development, particularly through their impact on credit markets and firm growth, the protection of vulnerable populations, their capacity to deter violence, and their influence over people’s trust in formal institutions. The paper then considers the promise of administrative data, machine learning, and randomized controlled trials to enhance the efficiency, access, and quality of justice. The paper concludes by discussing new avenues for research and the potential for data to improve the functioning of justice systems in the age of COVID-19.
Link to Data Set
Citation
Ramos Maqueda, Manuel; Chen, Daniel L.. 2021. The Role of Justice in Development: The Data Revolution. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 9720. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/35891 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.
Associated URLs
Associated content
Report Series
Report Series
Other publications in this report series
  • Publication
    Intergenerational Income Mobility around the World
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-09) Munoz, Ercio; Van der Weide, Roy
    This paper introduces a new global database with estimates of intergenerational income mobility for 87 countries, covering 84 percent of the world’s population. This marks a notable expansion of the cross-country evidence base on income mobility, particularly among low- and middle-income countries. The estimates indicate that the negative association between income mobility and inequality (known as the Great Gatsby Curve) continues to hold across this wider range of countries. The database also reveals a positive association between income mobility and national income per capita, suggesting that countries achieve higher levels of intergenerational mobility as they grow richer.
  • Publication
    The Future of Poverty
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-15) Fajardo-Gonzalez, Johanna; Nguyen, Minh C.; Corral, Paul
    Climate change is increasingly acknowledged as a critical issue with far-reaching socioeconomic implications that extend well beyond environmental concerns. Among the most pressing challenges is its impact on global poverty. This paper projects the potential impacts of unmitigated climate change on global poverty rates between 2023 and 2050. Building on a study that provided a detailed analysis of how temperature changes affect economic productivity, this paper integrates those findings with binned data from 217 countries, sourced from the World Bank’s Poverty and Inequality Platform. By simulating poverty rates and the number of poor under two climate change scenarios, the paper uncovers some alarming trends. One of the primary findings is that the number of people living in extreme poverty worldwide could be nearly doubled due to climate change. In all scenarios, Sub-Saharan Africa is projected to bear the brunt, contributing the largest number of poor people, with estimates ranging between 40.5 million and 73.5 million by 2050. Another significant finding is the disproportionate impact of inequality on poverty. Even small increases in inequality can lead to substantial rises in poverty levels. For instance, if every country’s Gini coefficient increases by just 1 percent between 2022 and 2050, an additional 8.8 million people could be pushed below the international poverty line by 2050. In a more extreme scenario, where every country’s Gini coefficient increases by 10 percent between 2022 and 2050, the number of people falling into poverty could rise by an additional 148.8 million relative to the baseline scenario. These findings underscore the urgent need for comprehensive climate policies that not only mitigate environmental impacts but also address socioeconomic vulnerabilities.
  • Publication
    Engineering Ukraine’s Wirtschaftswunder
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-29) Akcigit, Ufuk; Kilic, Furkan; Lall, Somik; Shpak, Solomiya
    As Ukraine emerges from the devastation of war, it faces a historic opportunity to engineer its own Wirtschaftswunder—a productivity-driven economic transformation akin to post-war West Germany. While investment-led growth may offer quick wins, it is efficiency, innovation, and institutional reform that will determine Ukraine’s long-term economic trajectory. Drawing on rich micro-level firm data spanning 25 years, this paper uncovers deep structural distortions that have suppressed creative destruction and productivity in Ukraine. It finds that business dynamism is on the decline, alongside rising market concentration among incumbent businesses, including low productivity state owned enterprises. To inform priorities for reviving business dynamism, this study develops a model of creative destruction drawing on Acemoglu et al. (2018) and Akcigit et al. (2021). The quantitative assessment highlights that policies that discipline entrenched incumbents are the bedrock for reviving business dynamism and engineer Ukraine’s Wirtschaftswunder. Policies targeting specific types of firms have limited efficacy when incumbents run wild.
  • Publication
    The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29) Abalo, Kodzovi; Boehlert, Brent; Bui, Thanh; Burns, Andrew; Castillo, Diego; Chewpreecha, Unnada; Haider, Alexander; Hallegatte, Stephane; Jooste, Charl; McIsaac, Florent; Ruberl, Heather; Smet, Kim; Strzepek, Ken
    Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.
  • Publication
    Disentangling the Key Economic Channels through Which Infrastructure Affects Jobs
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-04-03) Vagliasindi, Maria; Gorgulu, Nisan
    This paper takes stock of the literature on infrastructure and jobs published since the early 2000s, using a conceptual framework to identify the key channels through which different types of infrastructure impact jobs. Where relevant, it highlights the different approaches and findings in the cases of energy, digital, and transport infrastructure. Overall, the literature review provides strong evidence of infrastructure’s positive impact on employment, particularly for women. In the case of electricity, this impact arises from freeing time that would otherwise be spent on household tasks. Similarly, digital infrastructure, particularly mobile phone coverage, has demonstrated positive labor market effects, often driven by private sector investments rather than large public expenditures, which are typically required for other large-scale infrastructure projects. The evidence on structural transformation is also positive, with some notable exceptions, such as studies that find no significant impact on structural transformation in rural India in the cases of electricity and roads. Even with better market connections, remote areas may continue to lack economic opportunities, due to the absence of agglomeration economies and complementary inputs such as human capital. Accordingly, reducing transport costs alone may not be sufficient to drive economic transformation in rural areas. The spatial dimension of transformation is particularly relevant for transport, both internationally—by enhancing trade integration—and within countries, where economic development tends to drive firms and jobs toward urban centers, benefitting from economies scale and network effects. Turning to organizational transformation, evidence on skill bias in developing countries is more mixed than in developed countries and may vary considerably by context. Further research, especially on the possible reasons explaining the differences between developed and developing economies, is needed.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue

Related items

Showing items related by metadata.

  • Publication
    Do Judges Favor Their Own Ethnicity and Gender?
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-03-07) Chen, Daniel Li; Graham, Jimmy; Ramos Maqueda, Manuel; Singh, Shashank
    Evidence from high-income countries suggests that judges often exhibit in-group bias, favoring litigants that share an identity with the judge. However, there is little evidence on this phenomenon from the Global South. Collecting the available universe of High Court decisions in Kenya, this paper leverages the random assignment of cases to judges to evaluate the existence of in-group bias along gender and ethnic lines. It finds that, relative to a baseline win rate of 43 percent, defendants are 4 percentage points more likely to win if they share the judge's gender and 5 percentage points more likely to win if they share the judge~^!!^s ethnicity. The paper finds that the written judgements are on average shorter and less likely to be cited when defendants who are of the same gender or ethnicity as the judge win their case. This is consistent with in-group biased decisions being of lower quality. In addition, the findings show that female defendants are less likely to win the case if the judge exhibits stereotypical or negative attitudes towards women in their writings.
  • Publication
    Justice Development Programming in Fragile and Conflict-Affected Areas : Perspectives of Two Leaders in Justice Administration
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2011-01) Azimi, Abdul Salam; Tah, Christiana
    This spoken presentation profiles the efforts of the Supreme Court of Afghanistan to produce effective plans for developing that court and the judicial system in general. It offers an assessment of the limits of financial assistance by donors in bringing about rapid improvements in the quality of the judiciary. It argues for the need to invest in the human capital of the justice system as the most important though time consuming strategy for overcoming poor judicial performance and reducing corruption in the justice system. It also explains the strategic planning processes of the Supreme Court of Afghanistan and the reasons why the court's current plan deserves continued and sustained support from donors.
  • Publication
    Reforming Justice
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-14) Madadi, Sayed; Ramos-Maqueda, Manuel
    This Brief introduces the Justice Pillars Towards Evidence-Based Reform (JUPITER) initiative, a standardized yet flexible, country-based assessment tool that evaluates the effectiveness of justice systems across countries. Developed by the World Bank’s Global Program on Justice and the Rule of Law, JUPITER aims at identifying strengths and weaknesses in key pillars of judicial performance—access, efficiency, and quality. The Brief lays out key advantages of JUPITER’s comprehensive approach: its focus on areas with an empirical link to outcomes as investigated in rigorous academic research; its emphasis on the law as well as its application, which enables the identification of potential implementation gaps; its assessment of both the formal and customary justice institutions; and its coverage of the entire country. In so doing, we bring examples from its application in some of the poorest and most fragile countries in the world such as Liberia and South Sudan. This Brief explains the significance of access, efficiency, and quality for the effectiveness of justice delivery and how JUPITER measures performance in each of those areas. It concludes by discussing how the methodology could enable cross-country comparisons as more data is gathered through the JUPITER assessment
  • Publication
    Justice without the Rule of Law? The Challenge of Rights-Based Industrial Relations in Contemporary Cambodia
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2009-01) Adler, Daniel; Woolcock, Michael
    A significant proportion of the world's work is done in contexts where the rule of law is absent or severely lacking. This paper describes one such context, that of contemporary Cambodia. Based on a literature review and interviews with key informants the authors find that there are opportunities to embed labor markets in regulatory frameworks, even at the periphery of the global economy. In such contexts, however, it is suggested that orthodox models of legal and judicial reform, which focus on drafting better laws and building capacity in judicial and administrative institutions for their enforcement, may not be the most effective way forward. Rather, the Cambodian experience suggests that the following were crucial in moving towards better protection of workers' rights: understanding the limitations of law as an instrument for attainment of rights absent independent and accessible judicial institutions; confronting the barriers to the establishment of such institutions (and being open to alternative strategies); recalling that law can have a powerful normative force, even without direct enforcement; engaging with the way in which rights are attained through processes of social contest; and supporting institutional forums for such contests to be played out in ways which maximize the potential for the disadvantaged to take part and tap in to the legitimating power of the law.
  • Publication
    In Search of Success : Case Studies in Justice Sector Development in Sub-Saharan Africa
    (World Bank, 2010-06-01) Walsh, Barry
    The World Bank, Department for International Development (DFID) and other donors have long been engaged in legal and judicial reform in sub-Saharan Africa in such areas as legal drafting, strengthening court administration, judicial training, and the empowerment of citizens through a better understanding of the legal system. This has often been done on an ad hoc basis with only limited review of other reform efforts in the region. In order to foster a more responsive approach to justice sector development programs, a collection of case studies was commissioned. One of the more daunting tasks was identifying notable justice sector developments or reforms, which offered specific impacts and which could be examined through both a desk review and field research. Independent of the funding source, the evidence base was not only limited but revealed a need for donors themselves to invest in better data collection, which could then be analyzed and measured against benchmarks or objectives such as improved access to justice. There is a significant need to review and learn from experiences, including controversial ones, in Africa's justice sectors. These case studies are not homogenous largely because their subjects vary and span a wide array of developments that reflect the realities of the region. Each story stands alone and is in no particular order. In the final chapter, the conclusions offered in each story are digested into ideas for future actions. The collection also represents a modest range of stories and it is to be hoped that other cases will be identified and shared. A comparison of experiences of sector-wide programs (SWAPs), for example, could help both donors and governments enhance socio-economic impact. It should be noted that the emphasis in this report is on providing information about positive directions in justice sector development and the ways in which lessons learned might be applied to achieve greater impact in the future. The anticipated value of this collection is that some of the conclusions or actions may be taken up and used to contribute to improvements by those committed to improving the rule of law in sub-Saharan Africa and is in search of 'success'.

Users also downloaded

Showing related downloaded files

  • Publication
    Design Thinking for Social Innovation
    (2010-07) Brown, Tim; Wyatt, Jocelyn
    Designers have traditionally focused on enchancing the look and functionality of products.
  • Publication
    Government Matters III : Governance Indicators for 1996-2002
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-08) Kaufmann, Daniel; Kraay, Aart; Mastruzzi, Massimo
    The authors present estimates of six dimensions of governance covering 199 countries and territories for four time periods: 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002. These indicators are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 25 separate data sources constructed by 18 different organizations. The authors assign these individual measures of governance to categories capturing key dimensions of governance and use an unobserved components model to construct six aggregate governance indicators in each of the four periods. They present the point estimates of the dimensions of governance as well as the margins of errors for each country for the four periods. The governance indicators reported here are an update and expansion of previous research work on indicators initiated in 1998 (Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobat 1999a,b and 2002). The authors also address various methodological issues, including the interpretation and use of the data given the estimated margins of errors.
  • Publication
    Governance Matters IV : Governance Indicators for 1996-2004
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-06) Kaufmann, Daniel; Kraay, Aart; Mastruzzi, Massimo
    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.
  • Publication
    Breaking the Conflict Trap : Civil War and Development Policy
    (Washington, DC: World Bank and Oxford University Press, 2003) Collier, Paul; Elliott, V. L.; Hegre, Håvard; Hoeffler, Anke; Reynal-Querol, Marta; Sambanis, Nicholas
    Most wars are now civil wars. Even though international wars attract enormous global attention, they have become infrequent and brief. Civil wars usually attract less attention, but they have become increasingly common and typically go on for years. This report argues that civil war is now an important issue for development. War retards development, but conversely, development retards war. This double causation gives rise to virtuous and vicious circles. Where development succeeds, countries become progressively safer from violent conflict, making subsequent development easier. Where development fails, countries are at high risk of becoming caught in a conflict trap in which war wrecks the economy and increases the risk of further war. The global incidence of civil war is high because the international community has done little to avert it. Inertia is rooted in two beliefs: that we can safely 'let them fight it out among themselves' and that 'nothing can be done' because civil war is driven by ancestral ethnic and religious hatreds. The purpose of this report is to challenge these beliefs.
  • Publication
    Governance Matters VIII : Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators 1996–2008
    (2009-06-01) Kaufmann, Daniel; Kraay, Aart; Mastruzzi, Massimo
    This paper reports on the 2009 update of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) research project, covering 212 countries and territories and measuring six dimensions of governance between 1996 and 2008: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. These aggregate indicators are based on hundreds of specific and disaggregated individual variables measuring various dimensions of governance, taken from 35 data sources provided by 33 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. They find that even after taking margins of error into account, the WGI permit meaningful cross-country comparisons as well as monitoring progress over time. The aggregate indicators, together with the disaggregated underlying indicators, are available at www.govindicators.org.