Crime is an economically important activity, sometimes called the “industry of crime”. It may represent a mechanism of wealth distribution but also a social and economic charge because of the cost of the law enforcement system. Sometimes it may be less costly for the society to allow for some level of criminality. A drawback of such policy may lead to a high increase of criminal activity that m...

Th e idea of administrative limits—in the sense of constraints or bounds on what can be achieved by the activity of administration in general and public administration in particular—is important for a proper understanding of twenty-fi rst-century public administration. What are the eff ective limits of taxable capacity in the modern state, as debt-ridden governments seek to reduce debt levels a...

The Impact Evaluation Series has been established in recognition of the importance of impact evaluation studies for World Bank operations and for development in general. The series serves as a vehicle for the dissemination of findings of those studies. Papers in this series are part of the Bank's Policy Research Working Paper Series. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited...

Micro-enterprise credit programs are coming to be seen as an important innovation in economic development both in developing countries and, more recently, in the United States. The Grameen Bank in Bangladesh has been operating a decentralized village credit program since 1976 which has achieved impressive results making non-collateralized loans to the rural poor. Currently, a handful of organiz...

Initial models of development debates on how to achieve economic growth have been added to by a focus on social issues such as education and political participation. These debates and discourses about development are shaped by international organizations (IGOs) as they produce reference/action frameworks for actors in development policy. The paper suggests conceptualizing IGOs as world organiza...

What factors and processes influence the wealth of nations? This is the central question addressed by Professor North and his colleagues John Wallis and Barry Weingast (NWW) (2009) in their framework for “interpreting recorded human history.” In attempting to address this question, NWW develop a conceptual framework for understanding how institutions shape the organizations necessary for cooper...

This paper demonstrates that entrepreneurs who have created innovative organizations and service provision models are contributing to sustainable development. The processes, structures and outcomes of their initiatives are contrasted with more traditional efforts. World leaders have recently renewed the momentum for ‘buying’ sustainable development through massive allocation of development fund...

1 Background Why are some countries rich and others poor? Since Solow (1956), the tentative answer has been differences in capital accumulation and technical change, but this was unsatisfactory since the theory failed to explain what accounts for these differences. Endogenous growth theories (Aghion and Howit 1992; Grossman and Helpman 1991; Romer 1990) emerged to answer the faithful call and a...