World Bank

About: World Bank is a other organization based out in Washington D.C., District of Columbia, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poverty. The organization has 7813 authors who have published 21594 publications receiving 1198361 citations. The organization is also known as: World Bank, WB & The World Bank.

In Urban And Rural India, A Standardized Patient Study Showed Low Levels Of Provider Training And Huge Quality Gaps

Abstract: This article reports on the quality of care delivered by private and public providers of primary health care services in rural and urban India. To measure quality, the study used standardized patients recruited from the local community and trained to present consistent cases of illness to providers. We found low overall levels of medical training among health care providers; in rural Madhya Pradesh, for example, 67 percent of health care providers who were sampled reported no medical qualifications at all. What’s more, we found only small differences between trained and untrained doctors in such areas as adherence to clinical checklists. Correct diagnoses were rare, incorrect treatments were widely prescribed, and adherence to clinical checklists was higher in private than in public clinics. Our results suggest an urgent need to measure the quality of health care services systematically and to improve the quality of medical education and continuing education programs, among other policy changes.

Public versus private ownership : the current state of the debate

Abstract: At the heart of the debate about public versus private ownership lie three questions: 1) Does competition matter more than ownership? 2) Are state enterprises more subject to welfare-reducing interventions by government than private firms are? 3) Do state enterprises suffer more from governance problems than private firms do? Even if the answers to these questions favor private ownership, the question must still be asked: Do distortions in the process of privatization mean that privatized firms perform worse than state enterprises? The author's review found greater ambiguity about the merits of privatization and private ownership in the theoretical literature than in the empirical literature. In most cases, empirical research strongly favors private ownership in competitive markets over a state-owned counterfactual (although construction of the counterfactual is itself a problem). Theory's ambiguity about ownership in monopoly markets seems better justified. Since the choice confronting governments is between state ownership and privatization rather than between privatization and optimality, theory has left a gap that empirical work has tried to fill. Further research is needed.

Impacts of active labor market programs : new evidence from evaluations with particular attention to developing and transition countries

Abstract: In this paper, the authors provide an overview of the recent international experience with active labor market programs (ALMPs). Basing the evidence on the growing body of program evaluations, it focuses on the impacts of ALMPs on the subsequent employment and earnings of participants. This paper provides an update to earlier assessments by incorporating the results of the more recent program evaluations. It also extends these previous reviews by explicitly considering the impacts of ALMPs in developing and transition countries. While most rigorous program evaluations continue to be undertaken in industrialized countries, this gives a significant number of evaluations from transition and, to a lesser extent, developing countries.

CONOPT: A GRG code for large sparse dynamic nonlinear optimization problems

Abstract: The paper presents CONOPT, an optimization system for static and dynamic large scale nonlinearly constrained optimization problems The system is based on the GRG algorithm All computations involving the Jacobian of the constraints use sparse matrix algorithm from linear programming modified to take optimal advantage of the nonlinearity The paper presents the main features of the system, especially the inversion routines and their data structures, the dynamic setting of tolerances in Newton's algorithm, and the user features in the overall packaging Computational experience with some medium to large models is presented