This volume is a product of the staff of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this volume do not necessarily reflect the views of the Executive Directors of The World Bank or the governments they represent. The World Bank does not guarantee the accuracy of the data included in this work. The bound...

I to even 5%, compared with about 01% in most Western countries. Ophthalmological disorders represent not only a larger problem but also a different one: in developed countries the most common cause of blindness is degenerative or vascular disorders of the retina while in the developing countries five major diseases are responsible for most of the blindness-namely, trachoma, xerophthalmia, cata...

Recent years have seen a remarkable expansion in economists’ ability to measure corruption. This, in turn, has led to a new generation of well-identified, microeconomic studies. We review the evidence on corruption in developing countries in light of these recent advances, focusing on three questions: how much corruption is there, what are the efficiency consequences of corruption, and what det...

Background: Developing countries need telemedicine applications that help in many situations, when physicians are a small number with respect to the population, when specialized physicians are not available, when patients and physicians in rural villages need assistance in the delivery of health care. Moreover, the requirements of telemedicine applications for developing countries are somewhat ...

Improving the availability of high quality diagnostic tests for infectious diseases is a global priority. Lack of access by people living in low income countries may deprive them of life saving treatment and reduces opportunities to prevent onward transmission and spread of the disease. Diagnostic laboratories are often poorly resourced in developing countries, and sparsely distributed. Improve...

I ALL THE MAJOR CHALLENGES CURRENTLY FACING the world, whether it is climate change, terrorism and conflict or urbanization and demographic shifts, no progress is possible without the alleviation of poverty. To reduce poverty sustainably, however, reducing household vulnerability and increasing household resilience are also necessary. This aspect is often overlooked by policy-makers. For instan...

Environmental performance assessments are often conducted using environmental indicators. Although these indicators provide a starting point for performance assessments, they do not provide guidelines that countries should follow to improve performance. This paper develops an enhanced Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model that provides a single summary measure of countries’ environmental perfor...

The number of regional trade agreements has nearly doubled in the last four years. Interestingly, relatively small countries have put enormous effort into joining regional agreements with larger countries during this period. In this paper, we address the following question: why are small countries so eager to be a part of these agreements? We construct a general equilibrium model of a natural t...

The rapid urbanization in many developing countries over the past half century seems to have been accompanied by excessively high levels of concentration of the urban population in very large cities. Some degree of urban concentration may be desirable initially to reduce interand intraregional infrastructure expenditures. But in a mature system of cities, economic activity is more spread out. S...