While many international organisations have independent evaluations, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Health organization (WHO), uniquely the World Bank in its 2015 World Development Report sought to ascertain the potential biases that influence how its staff interpret evidence and influence policy. Here, we describe the World Bank's study design, including experiments ...

from chronic food insecurity (World Food Program, 2010). One third of the population is food insecure, the most vulnerable of whom are women and children. International Financial Institutions (IFIs), including the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB) and the InterAmerican Development Bank (IDB), have severely undermined Haiti’s ability to improve food security and reduce hunge...

The recent financial crises starting from one country (e.g. Mexico in 1994, Thailand in 1997) and spreading as a contagion to others (i.e. the ’tequila’ effect of the Mexican crisis on Argentina and other Latin American countries, the spread to Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan of the Thai crisis, the rapid spread of financial instability after the Russian crisis in th...

Conservation and development are intricately linked. The international donor community has long provided aid to tropical countries in an effort to alleviate poverty and conserve biodiversity. While hundreds of millions of $ have been invested in over 500 environmental-based projects in Madagascar during the period covered by a series of National Environmental Action Plans (1993-2008) and the pr...

A theory of the optimal number of banking relationships is developed and tested using matched bank-firm data. According to the theory, relationship banks may be unable to continue funding profitable projects owing to internal problems and a firm may thus have to refinance from non-relationship banks. The latter, however, face an adverse selection problem, as they do not know the quality of the ...

This paper proposes the creation of a Sovereign Borrowing Entity (SBE) under the auspices of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other International Financial Institutions (IFIs). The SBE guarantees bond issuances by developing nations, packages them in relatively small denominations, and auctions them to the public. Should a developing debtor country fail to pay its debt, the SBE would r...

In South Africa, at a time when National Health Insurance should be generously funded (7 years after its approval as public policy by the ruling party), state fiscal austerity appears certain to nip the initiative in the bud. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund issued separate reports about South Africa in late 2014, following a new finance minister's mid-term budget speech. In j...

Abstract This article develops the concept of “interorganizational pathologies” as an extension Michael N. Barnett and Martha Finnemore's work on bureaucratic pathologies. Adopting open system perspective, I argue that dysfunctional interactions may arise between international organizations (IOs) even when their cooperation is fairly institutionalized. To advance this line reasoning, examine In...

globalization is integration of national economies in global economy and infers on increasing the flow of goods and services. in this study the consequences of globalization were studied through the analysis of level of international trade index (lit) in the caviar export equation. the required data were gathered from statistical yearbook of foreign trade, statistical yearbook of fisheries, sta...

This study examines the level of unsecured borrowing done by the firms that would ultimately rescue Long-Term Capital Management in the days leading up to the hedge fund’s rescue. Although there is some evidence that these banks borrowed less at the height of the crisis, further examination reveals that this reduction in borrowing was demand-driven and did not result from rationing on the part ...