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"India no longer faces the famine and epidemics which kept life expectancy barely over 30 years at Independence. Despite progress in food production, disease control, and economic and social development, India accounts for 40 percent of the world's malnourished children, with less than 20 percent of the global child population." India has taken the problem of malnutrition seriously since its Independence in 1947, more so than many other countries, and has developed appropriate policies and mounted major programs to address it. This report forms part of the Government of India-World Bank collaboration in nutrition, which began in 1980. Its aim is to review the effectiveness, efficiency and impact of public spending on nutrition in India, and to suggest how these might be enhanced. It identifies the programs that are working and the areas where action is needed. It also projects the possible cost of the suggested programs.
Safety nets are noncontributory transfer programs targeted to the poor or vulnerable. They play important roles in social policy. Safety nets redistribute income, thereby immediately reducing poverty and inequality; they enable households to invest in the human capital of their children and in the livelihoods of their earners; they help households manage risk, both ex ante and ex post; and they allow governments to implement macroeconomic or sectoral reforms that support efficiency and growth. To be effective, safety nets must not only be well intended, but also well designed and well implemented. A good safety net system and its programs are tailored to country circumstances, adequate in th...
World Bank Technical Paper No. 361. Education has emerged as an essential component of the transition to a market economy in Central and Eastern Europe. Although the countries of the region inherited broadly accessible education systems, the legacies of central planning have constrained the systems from fully adjusting to market economies. This study examines empirical trends in access to and financing of education in nine Central and East European countries by drawing on the findings of a World Bank project that examined the social risks facing people and the policy responses taken by governments since 1989. Chapters address access and participation, the labor market, financing, and staff in the education sector.
A Billion Dollars a Day “This text provides a good narrative on the economics of government intervention, the structure of the world food system and history of the WTO, and the provision of farm subsidies by developed economies, with a special focus on the U.S. and EU.” P. Lynn Kennedy, Louisiana State University “This extremely well-researched and documented book provides a comprehensive overview of the impact (both intentional and unintentional) that developed nations’ agricultural policies can have on underdeveloped agricultural-based nations.” Jay E. Noel, Cal Poly State University “This text’s discussion and explanation of subsidies is well developed in a historical and in...
This book presents the first large-scale examination of the reasons why people fall into poverty and how they escape it in diverse contexts. It draws on personal interviews with 35,000 households in India, Kenya, Uganda, Peru, and the United States.
In 2013, the World Bank Group adopted two new goals to guide its work: ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity. More specifically, the goals are to reduce extreme poverty in the world to less than 3 percent by 2030, and to foster income growth of the bottom 40 percent of the population in each country. While poverty reduction has been a mainstay of the World Bank s mission for decades, the Bank has now set a specific goal and timetable, and for the first time, the Bank has explicitly included a goal linked to ensuring that growth is shared by all. The discussion until now has centered primarily on articulating the new goals. This report, the latest in World Bank s Policy Resear...
This study provides a diagnostic of the benefit incidence and targeting performance of social programs in Ghana together with suggestions for how to improve targeting performance.
When are policy makers willing to make costly adjustments to their macroeconomic policies to mitigate balance-of-payments problems? Which types of adjustment strategies do they choose? Under what circumstances do they delay reform, and when are such delays likely to result in financial crises? To answer these questions, this book examines how macroeconomic policy adjustments affect individual voters in financially open economies and argues that the anticipation of these distributional effects influences policy makers' decisions about the timing and the type of reform. Empirically, the book combines analyses of cross-national survey data of voters' and firms' policy evaluations with comparative case studies of national policy responses to the Asian financial crisis of 1997/8 and the recent global financial crisis in Eastern Europe. The book shows that variation in policy makers' willingness to implement reform can be traced back to differences in the vulnerability profiles of their countries' electorates.
This booklet examines the efforts of Bangladesh, Malawi, and Pakistan to increase the number of girls in school. These three countries have severe problems of access to education, ranking in the bottom third of developing countries on UNESCO's Basic Education Index. The document addresses several issues, including how governments grapple with the deep-seated cultural, institutional, and political factors that underlie the gender disparity in access to school, how parents and communities feel about these attempts, and what impact the reform efforts have on the people involved in managing and running the school system. It also follows the lives of some of the girls who have benefited from the reforms.