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There is broad recognition, across the political spectrum and in both 'northern' and 'southern' countries, that justice reform, and more generally the promotion of the 'rule of law', are central to development policy, particularly in conflict-affected, fragile and violent contexts. More recently an increased focus on global security and the interaction between security and development as put a renewed emphasis on such efforts. However, while legal, regulatory and 'justice' institutions are now seen as key part of the 'solution' to problems of conflict, fragility and development, this recognition is not matched by a correspondingly clear sense of what should be done, how it should be done, by whom, in what order, or how 'success' may be determined. There often tends to be a clear misunderstanding of both the nature of the problem and (thus) of the solution. In this paper, the author seek to provide some insight into these questions and sketch out a practical conception of effective justice reform in situations of conflict and fragility that may provide the basis for effective programming.

The idea of social inclusion has garnered considerable attention, especially in the context of two recent developments: the Sustainable Development Goals and the heightened attention to inequality. This paper reviews the manner and extent to which social inclusion is addressed in the first 17 Systematic Country Diagnostics (SCDs), which are ex ante, country-level assessments conducted by the World Bank Group, ahead of the preparation of its Country Partnership Frameworks. In addition to this primary purpose, the paper fulfils three other purposes. It allows for a broader reflection on the value of the social inclusion construct in macro-level diagnostics; it takes the opportunity to develop and refine a methodology to assess social inclusion and finally, it positions the narrative on social inclusion into the ongoing discourse on poverty, shared prosperity, inequality and the thinking around the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. It is therefore, a refined articulation of the idea of social inclusion in the context of global epistemological shifts

Although women’s police centers have been gaining popularity as a measure to address domestic violence, to date no quantitative evaluations of their impacts on the incidence of domestic violence or any other manifestations of gender equality have been done. This paper estimates the effects of women’s police stations in Brazil on female homicides, as a measure of the most severe form of domestic violence. Given that a high fraction of female deaths among women ages 15 to 49 years can be attributed to aggression by an intimate partner, female homicides appear the best available proxy for severe domestic violence considering the scarcity of data on domestic violence. The paper uses a panel of 2,074 municipalities and takes advantage of the gradual rollout of women’s police stations from 2004 to 2009, to estimate the effect of establishing a women’s police station on the municipal female homicide rate. Although the analysis does not find an association on average, women’s police stations appear to be highly effective among some groups of women: women living in metropolitan areas and younger women. Establishing a women’s police station in a metropolitan municipality is associated with a reduction in the homicide rate by 1.23 deaths per 100,000 women (which roughly amounts to a 17 percent reduction in the average homicide rate in metropolitan municipalities). The reduction in the homicide rate of women ages 15 to 24 is even higher: 5.57 deaths per 100,000 women. Qualitative work suggests that better economic opportunities and less traditional social norms in metropolitan areas may explain the heterogeneous impacts of women’s police stations in metropolitan areas and outside them.

This paper brings together sociological theories of culture and gender to answer the question – how do large-scale development interventions induce cultural change? Through three years of ethnographic work in rural Bihar, the authors examine this question in the context of Jeevika, a World Bank-assisted poverty alleviation project targeted at women, and find support for an integrative view of culture. The paper argues that Jeevika created new “cultural configurations” by giving economically and socially disadvantaged women access to a well-defined network of people and new systems of knowledge, which changed women’s habitus and broke down normative restrictions constitutive of the symbolic boundary of gender.

Several studies explore the differences in men’s and women’s labor market participation rates and wages. Some of these differences have been linked to gender disparities in education attainment and access. The present paper contributes to this literature by analyzing the relationship between the proclivity of a firm to have a female top manager and access to education among women relative to men in the country. The paper combines the literature on women’s careers in management, which has mostly focused on developed countries, with the development literature that has emphasized the importance of access to education. Using firm-level data for 73 developing countries, the analysis finds strong evidence that countries with a higher proportion of female top managers also have higher enrollment rates for women relative to men in primary, secondary, and tertiary education.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, intergenerational relations remain a key aspect of the future development and sustainability of the European social model. In the present paper, patterns of intergenerational support and the main driving factors behind individuals' transfer behavior are explored. In particular, the data form the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe are utilized to shed light on the main factors behind the likelihood and intensity of social support, and financial help provided to and received from other family members by ageing and elderly Europeans. The analysis also takes into consideration patterns and factors correlated with grandparenting activities. Finally, special attention is devoted to the condition of those individuals who are sandwiched between care obligations toward their elderly parents and young adult children. It is shown that the likelihood of the exchange of support between family generations is highest in Scandinavian countries and lowest in Southern Europe. The intensity of support follows an opposite North-South gradient. In addition, relevant gender-related inequalities are documented. In general, time-demanding support obligations are more likely to fall on the shoulders of women in the early stage of their later life, while mainly benefitting elderly men.

Biases from truncation caused by coresidency restriction have been a challenge for research on intergenerational mobility. Estimates of intergenerational schooling persistence from two data sets show that the intergenerational regression coefficient, the most widely used measure, is severely biased downward in coresident samples. But the bias in intergenerational correlation is much smaller, and is less sensitive to the coresidency rate. The paper provides explanations for these results. Comparison of intergenerational mobility based on the intergenerational regression coefficient across countries, gender, and over time can be misleading. Much progress on intergenerational mobility in developing countries can be made with the available data by focusing on intergenerational correlation.

When measuring inequality of opportunity, researchers usually opt to eliminate within-type variation. Provided that in practice it is impossible to observe all circumstances, this implies that the researcher estimates a lower bound of the true level of inequality of opportunity. By using data drawn from 27 Demographic Household Surveys (circa 2008), it is found that lower bound estimates can have substantial measurement error, and that measurement error can vary considerably across countries. As a consequence, lower bound estimates of inequality of opportunity can demand too little redistribution to equalize inequalities due to circumstances and can make the “traditional” cross-country comparisons misleading.

For a sample of 53 developing countries, the results show that women's employment among private firms is significantly higher in countries that mandate paternity leave versus those that do not. A conservative estimate suggests an increase of 6.8 percentage points in the proportion of women workers associated with the mandating of paternity leave.

This technical note highlights some of the work the World Bank has recently conducted in support of the growth agenda outlined in the Europe 2020 strategy. The World Bank is actively supporting the new member states, as well as accession and neighborhood countries, in achieving the Europe 2020 targets of smart, sustainable, and inclusive growth. The engagement consists of policy and program lending in these areas as well as analytical work. This note focuses on highlighting some of the Bank's analytical Europe 2020 work pertaining to raising employment rates and skills levels as well as to spur innovation and technology absorption. The technical note is structured as follows: section one provides the macroeconomic background, and highlights how the economies of the European Union (EU)-10 countries were steadily catching up with those of the EU-15 countries, but then the catching-up was interrupted by the onset of the global financial and economic crisis. Section two focuses on low employment rates in EU-10 countries, particularly among older and less-educated workers, women, and minority groups, in particular Roma, and highlights some key issues in the organization of labor markets and labor market related institutions. Section three focuses more specifically on skills development across the life cycle, with a brief discussion on selected policy areas: (1) expansion of early childhood development programs to universal coverage; (2) adopting ambitious, comprehensive approaches to schooling to support higher levels of generic skills for all; and (3) strengthening access to and efficiency of tertiary education through higher education financing reform and data collection as a basis for system steering. Section four focuses on innovation and technology absorption, highlighting how more and more efficient research and development (R&D) spending will boost economic growth in EU10 countries.

Over the last 20 years, macroeconomists have increasingly given attention to the role of gender in the macroeconomy and the implications of macro-level policies for gender equality. This paper reviews the salient findings of that literature. Research shows that gender gaps in education, health, unpaid labor, employment, and wages affect the macroeconomy, influencing the rate of per capita GDP growth. The effects are transmitted via both the supply side of the economy, principally through labor productivity, and the demand side, through business spending, exports, saving, and the balance of payments. Theoretical perspectives influence which gender gaps are incorporated into models as well as how. For example, heterodox economists emphasize the demand and supply side in the short and long run, while neoclassical economists tend to focus on long-run supply-side effects. There is widespread agreement in the literature that greater gender equality in education and employment (proxied by labor force participation rates) stimulates long-run per capita growth. Improving women’s relative productivity through educational investments and facilitating their participation in paid labor serves several purposes. For example, assuming talent is equally distributed across men and women, a narrowing of gender gaps in education and employment contributes to higher average educational attainment and a more efficient allocation of labor. As educational attainment rises and women gain greater access to paid work, the opportunity cost of having additional children also rises, leading to a decline in fertility rates. Women’s bargaining power within the household rises at the same time. This increases their ability to allocate household spending in ways that benefit children, and as a result, economy-wide labor productivity growth. The weak link in this chain is that aggregate demand may be insufficient to absorb an increase in women’s relative labor supply. Demand-stimulating policies as well as other policy measures may be necessary to ensure women’s relative employment rate rises. Full employment policies can help to narrow the employment gap and well-targeted physical and social infrastructure investments have been found to promote women’s access to paid work. Finally, traditional monetary policy—that is, the use of interest rates to manage demand and by extension, inflation, has gender-related employment effects, and exchange rate policy also influences the gender wage gap. This area of policymaking has received much less attention than fiscal policy as a tool for promoting gender equality. The paper concludes with a discussion of areas for future research.

To explain persistent gender gaps in market outcomes, a lab experimental literature explores whether women and men have innate differences in ability (or attitudes or preferences), and a separate field-based literature studies discrimination against women in market settings. This paper posits that even if women have comparable innate ability, their relative performance may suffer in the market if the task requires them to interact with others in society, and they are subject to discrimination in those interactions. The paper tests these ideas using a large-scale field experiment in 142 Malawian villages where men or women were randomly assigned the task of learning about a new agricultural technology, and then communicating it to others to convince them to adopt it. Although female communicators learn and retain the new information just as well, and those taught by women experience higher farm yields, the women are not as successful at teaching or convincing others to adopt the new technology. Micro-data on individual interactions from 4,000 farmers in these villages suggest that other farmers perceive female communicators to be less able, and are less receptive to the women's messages. Relatively small incentives for rewards undo the disparity in performance by encouraging added interactions, improving farmers' accuracy about female communicators' relative skill.

This paper investigates the effect of access to finance on job growth in 50,000 firms across 70 developing countries. Using the introduction of credit bureaus as an exogenous shock to the supply of credit, the paper finds that increased access to finance results in higher employment growth, especially among micro, small, and medium enterprises. The results are robust to using firm fixed effects, industry measures of external finance dependence, and propensity score matching in a complementary panel data set of more than four million firms in 29 developing countries. The findings have implications for policy interventions targeted to produce job growth in micro, small, and medium enterprises.

A range of reasons is cited to explain gender differences in business performance in Africa. Within those, the sector of operations is consistently identified as a major issue. This paper uses a mixed methods approach to assess how women entrepreneurs in Uganda start (and strive) operating firms in male-dominated sectors, and what hinders other women from doing so. The study finds that women who cross over into male-dominated sectors make as much as men, and three times more than women who stay in female-dominated sectors. The paper examines a set of factors to explain the differences in sector choices, and finds that there is a problem of information about opportunities in male-dominated industries. The analysis also concludes that psychosocial factors, particularly the influence of male role models and exposure to the sector from family and friends, are critical in helping women circumvent or overcome the norms that undergird occupational segregation.

In democracies, innovative political institutions have opened up scope for direct public participation often in the form of talk: citizens talking to the state and mutual talk among citizens on matters concerning community development. A prominent example is the Indian gram sabha, or village assembly, which occurs in a highly stratified context. This paper undertakes a talk-centered analysis of the gram sabha with a focus on examining the oral participation of women in general and women affiliated with microcredit self-help groups who have access to an associational life. The qualitative analysis of 255 gram sabha transcripts from four South Indian states finds that women associated with microcredit self-help groups employ a wider variety of narrative styles and utilize a more multilayered structure to convey their messages compared with all women taken together. Thus, the difference is not so much in the numerical instances of talking or in the types of issues raised, but rather in the quality of participation. The paper makes an important theoretical contribution by proposing the concept of oral democracy as an alternative to deliberative democracy, and urges an analytical focus on the oral or oratory competency of subordinated groups as they participate in these important institutions.

This paper uses three waves of longitudinal data to examine the impact of expanding access to preschool services in rural areas of Indonesia on two cohorts of children. One cohort was children aged 4 at the start of the project and was immediately eligible for project-provided services when they began operation in 2009. The other cohort was children aged 1 at the start of the project and became eligible for project-provided services two years later. The paper presents intent-to-treat estimates of impact in the short term (first year of the project) and medium term (three years after the project started), using experimental and quasi-experimental methods. For the cohort of 4-year-olds, while the magnitude of the enrollment impact is similar across children from different backgrounds, the impact on child outcomes is larger for children from more disadvantaged backgrounds in the short and medium terms. However, for this cohort of children, it seems that project-provided playgroups encouraged substitution away from existing kindergartens, suggesting that future interventions should incorporate such possibilities into their design. For the average child in the younger cohort, the project led to improvements in physical health and well-being as well as language and cognitive development. For this cohort, there is little evidence of differential impact. This can be explained by the fact that children who enrolled soon after the centers opened (the older cohort) were generally poorer, compared with children who enrolled later (the younger cohort). This may be because of fee increases in project centers as project funding ended.

This paper attempts to determine the extent to which inequality in wage earnings in the Russian Federation is unfair. Unlike other similar attempts that can, at best, produce a lower bound on the estimate of the share of inequality that is unfair, this paper exploits the longitudinal nature of the data to come up with a lower bound as well as an upper bound. The upper bound is further refined to take into account the indirect effect of circumstances at birth (gender, parental wealth, etc.) on effort. Results show that the upper bound on the inequality of opportunity may be three to four times the measured lower bound and significantly higher for females than males in the sample. Finally, comparison with the United States and Germany show that although total inequality is lower in Russia, the share of unfair inequality is distinctly larger. The markedly large explanatory role of extraneous factors, such as gender and parental characteristics, in wage inequality calls for a close examination of governments’ efforts to address inequities in the labor market.

The discipline of law and economics deals with wide-ranging topics, from competition and environmental policy to crime control, and has been instrumental in determining how an economy performs. Yet its success has fallen short of its potential. The discipline’s shortcomings are nowhere as visible as in developing economies, where a common refrain is how the law looks good on paper but does not get implemented. This paper articulates a methodological flaw that underlies much of contemporary law and economics, and argues that there is an intimate connection between human beliefs and expectations, on the one hand, and the effectiveness of the law, on the other. I propose a new approach to law and economics that is rooted in game theory and rectifies the flaw. It is argued that this approach can open up new areas of research and be marshalled to address some of the more pressing policy challenges of our time.

The Accra Agenda for Action contains a commitment to increase aid effectiveness by 'addressing the issue of countries with insufficient aid.' This paper highlights the difficulties in identifying such countries unequivocally, given the limited theoretical and empirical knowledge on optimal aid allocations. Actual aid receipts by low income countries are compared to several benchmarks derived from different aid allocation models. These models differ primarily with regard to the weights assigned to country needs and performance. The analysis shows that different aid allocation models identify different sets of countries as receiving insufficient aid. The paper does not find a greater tendency for fragile states to receive insufficient aid compared to non-fragile states. However, there appears a greater tendency for bilateral aid to leave countries with insufficient aid compared to multi-lateral aid, which in fact in many cases partly compensates for under-funding from bilateral donors. The potential aggregate cost of increasing aid to countries with insufficient aid varies significantly depending on which aid allocation model is used, but could be as high as US$ 7 billion annually. Enhanced coordination of donors' aid allocation decisions to ensure that no low income country ends up inadvertently as an aid orphan will be an important step in addressing 'the issue of countries with insufficient aid.'

This paper explores how a 'conflict and violence sensitive' framework in project assessment, design and implementation facilitates early identification and mitigation of negative consequences of competition and dispute, and promotes sustainable development over the longer term. It discusses the role of renewable resources in perpetuating conflict and violence, and distills lessons from selected development programming experiences in managing conflict risks associated with these dynamics. The study emphasizes that building capacity to productively address conflict and to improve community resilience to ecological change decreases vulnerability to violence, and improves livelihoods particularly for the world's poorest communities. The study draws on a range of development experience and specifically examines six case studies: three from the World Bank portfolio and three external to the Bank. Of the World Bank projects, the paper considers Andhra Pradesh Community Forest Management Project (India), Land Conflict and Vulnerability Pilot Project (Afghanistan), and Second Fadama Development Project (Nigeria). The paper also studies three external cases: conservation of managed indigenous areas (Ecuador) and Building the Capacity of Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature (ICCN) to Resolve and Manage Environmental Conflicts in Virunga National Park (DRC), both financed by U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID); and the Community Development Component of German Technical Cooperation's (GTZ's) Palestinian Water Program (West Bank). The concluding chapter outlines good practice and lessons learned from experience, emphasizing principals for building institutional and organizational capacity that support constructive conflict management.

This paper estimates the impact of the Golden Quadrilateral and North-South-East-West Highways in India on welfare, social inclusion, and environmental quality. The analysis uses district-level data for 1994-2011 and the difference-in-difference method. The results suggest that the highways shifted employment from the farm to the nonfarm sector, and that this shift was accompanied by an increase in output per capita. However, there is no evidence of an impact on household expenditure per capita, the poverty rate, or the incidence of regular wage employment. The results suggest that the highways caused an increase in air pollution. The effects of the highways are heterogeneous, depending on conditions in local factor and product markets.

Governments must decide how to allocate limited resources for infrastructure development, particularly since financing gaps have been projected for the coming decades. Social cost-benefit analysis provides sound project appraisal and, when systematically applied, a basis for prioritization. In some instances, however, capacity and resource limitations make extensive economic analyses across all projects unfeasible in the immediate term. This paper responds to a need for expanding the available set of tools for project selection by proposing an alternative prioritization approach that is systematic and feasible within the current resource means of government. The Infrastructure Prioritization Framework is a multi-criteria decision support tool that considers project outcomes along two dimensions, social-environmental and financial-economic. When large sets of small- to medium-sized projects are proposed, resources are limited, and basic project appraisal data (but not full social cost-benefit analysis) are available, the Infrastructure Prioritization Framework can inform project selection by combining selection criteria into social-environmental and financial-economic indexes. These indexes are used to plot projects on a Cartesian plane, and the sector budget is imposed to create a project map for comparison along each dimension. The Infrastructure Prioritization Framework is structured to accommodate multiple policy objectives, attend to social and environmental factors, provide an intuitive platform for displaying results, and take advantage of available data while promoting capacity building and data collection for more sophisticated appraisal methods and selection frameworks. Decision criteria, weighting, and sensitivity analysis should be decided and made transparent in advance of selection, and analysis should be made publicly available and open to third-party review.

New qualitative fieldwork in eight countries of Europe and Central Asia (ECA) indicates that the dramatic declines in poverty in much of the region over the last decade do not appear to be registering very favorably with men and women on the ground. This paper provides a gender analysis of findings from equal numbers of sex-specific focus groups with employed and jobless individuals. The methodology featured a standardized package of semi-structured data collection tools, which enabled systematic comparative analysis of the datasets from 37 urban and rural communities across eight countries in the region. While lack of jobs and the rising cost of living are central concerns for both women and men across the sample, the qualitative data highlights important gender differences in how men and women are responding to these challenges that quantitative survey approaches appear to miss. Throughout the sample, women are widely reported to be doing everything they can to pull their households out of poverty or to maintain their families in the middle class, while men voice deep frustration with their weak economic opportunities and the need for additional household members to contribute economically. Women’s increased economic participation in the face of men’s hardships with breadwinning - and the stress on gender roles and relations that this entails - are crucial for making sense of frustrations on the ground despite the region’s significant social and economic development.

Despite recent calls in support of cash transfers, there is little rigorous evidence of the relative impacts of cash versus in-kind transfers, especially in humanitarian contexts, where a majority of such programs take place. This paper uses data from a randomized experiment in the Democratic Republic of Congo to assess the relative impacts and costs of equivalently valued cash and voucher transfers. The voucher program distorted households’ purchases along both the extensive and intensive margin as compared with unconstrained cash households. Yet there were no differences in food consumption or other measures of well-being, in part due to the fact that voucher households were able to resell part of what they purchased. As there were no significant benefits to vouchers, cash transfers were the more cost effective modality for both the implementing agency and program recipients in this context.

Some multilateral agencies implement aid projects in a broad range of sectors, with aid disbursements showing a strong overlap with those of bilateral donors. The question then arises of why do bilateral donors delegate sizable shares of their aid to non-specialized agencies for implementation? This paper develops a game theoretic model to explain this puzzle. Donors delegate aid implementation to the multilateral agency (ML) to strengthen the policy selectivity of aid, incentivizing policy improvements in recipient countries, in turn improving aid’s development effectiveness. Bilateral donors are better off delegating aid to ML even when they are purely altruistic but disagree on how aid should be distributed across recipients. Key for our result to hold is that ML searches some middle ground among disagreeing donors. Aid selectivity—in terms of both policy and poverty—emerges endogenously and is credible, as it is the solution to ML’s optimization problem. Moreover, the model shows that if one sufficiently large donor is policy selective in its aid allocations, there is no need for other donors to be policy selective. The World Bank’s aid program for lower-income countries, the International Development Administration (IDA), is shown to fit the assumptions and predictions of the model. Specifically, IDA is a dominant donor in most of its recipient countries and is much more policy and poverty selective than bilateral aid. Donors view it as a public good, and contribution more to it when bilateral aid is less selective. Potential threats to IDA’s role as a dominant, policy-selective donor include the emergence of nontraditional donors, changes in voting shares, and traditional donors’ increasing use of earmarked contributions.

The development community is increasingly accepting the importance of evidence, feedback, and learning. Some of which is generated through research, monitoring, and self-evaluation during policy-making, program design, and implementation. Others come from feedback from people directly affected by interventions who have gained a greater voice, be it through third-party feedback mechanisms, social media, beneficiary surveys, or otherwise. And, there is independent evaluation. At the World Bank Group, the independent evaluation group (IEG) has over the past years deepened the evidence that can help development finance succeed in translating the sustainable development goals (SDGs) into actions and results. This paper brings together insights from a cross-section of relevant evaluations that cover various aspects of the large, multifaceted agenda of the SDGs and their financing needs.

Over the past couple of decades, global financing for development has changed dramatically. The biggest shifts have been the rapid increase of net private financing flows to developing countries, in particular to middle-income countries (MICs); the sustained growth of official development assistance (ODA) from Development Assistance Committee (DAC) members, even excluding debt relief; the emergence of MICs as growth poles and sources of ODA with different approaches to aid delivery than those of DAC donors; and the expanded role of private aid. In addition, past trends of proliferation, fragmentation and earmarking of aid have continued. This paper reviews broad trends in global financing for development, with a focus on ODA and the growing importance of new development partners such as the so-called BRICS. In this context, it discusses the implications of this changing landscape for aid effectiveness and the role of ODA going forward.

This paper reviews the evidence about the effects of urbanization and cities on productivity and economic growth in developing countries using a consistent theoretical framework. Just like in developed economies, there is strong evidence that cities in developing countries bolster productive efficiency. Regarding whether cities promote self-sustained growth, the evidence is suggestive but ultimately inconclusive. These findings imply that the traditional agenda of aiming to raise within-city efficiency should be continued. Furthermore, reducing the obstacles to the reallocation of factors across cities is also desirable.