This paper is prepared for presentation at the ABCDE Europe Workshop " Development Thinking at the Millennium, " organized by the World Bank and to be held in Paris, June 26-28, 2000. The author is thankful to Richard Newfarmer for his comments and to David Bisbee for his editorial assistance. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the author and do ...

Why do firms and banks hold foreign currency denominated liabilities? In this paper, we argue that foreign currency debt, by altering the effect of a devaluation on output, has a disciplining effect when the Central Bank’s objectives differ from the social optimum. However, under imperfect information, bad priors about the Central Bank induce excess dollarization of liabilities, which in turn l...

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the positions of Georgetown University or the World Bank 2 " The celebration of capital flows in the early 1990s and the subsequent skepticism were both excessive. The reality is more complicated and therefore requires a more nuanced policy response… This implies a multiplicity of measures that not only foster absorption of i...

The audience for this toolkit is World Bank Task Managers and their counterparts in other organizations—those who, in response to requests, go to countries, assess the problems, design projects to address these problems, and implement or supervise these projects. Most World Bank staff are already overloaded with work and do not have the time to read material that is impractical or researchorien...

The Indonesian health card program, which was implemented in response the economic crisis which hit Indonesia in 1998, provided the owners of healthcards with subsidized care at public providers. This papers looks at the impact of this program on outpatient care utilization. It finds that the program resulted in a net increase in utilization for the poor beneficiaries. For non-poor beneficiarie...

I am pleased to be here today to discuss the impact that switching some loans to grants would have on poor countries debt burdens. In July 2001, President Bush proposed that the World Bank and other development banks replace 50 percent of future loans to the worlds poorest countries with grants. A goal of this proposal was to relieve poor countries long-term debt burdens. The presidents grants ...

Drawing from the encouragement of Prof. Norman Uphoff to start SRI in Kenya, the first meeting to plan and introduce SRI was held at the Mwea Irrigation Scheme in July 2009, organized by Prof. Bancy Mati of JKUAT and Markus Moeller (then the Irrigation Specialist at the World Bank office in Kenya). The two drew together some like-minded individuals to form a collaborative team comprised of staf...

For years, the Internet has been the new black, the "in" thing, the must have. And the virtual fever is spreading. According to the World Bank, global Internet use more than quadrupled between 2000 and 2005, from 15 users per 1000 population to 67.[1] Yet, many Global South countries are stalled on the Information Superhighway: the same World Bank report found that only 15 per 1000 population i...

This article applies the method of difference panel GMM Arellano-Bond for a dataset of eighty two developing countries (These countries are classified into three economies basing on estimates of gross national income (GNI) per capita for the 2014 year by using the World Bank Atlas method 1 ) during a period from 1996 to 2013 to empirically assess the impact of institutional quality (based on si...