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.

Does corruption affect income inequality and poverty

Abstract: This paper provides evidence that high and rising corruption increases income inequality and poverty. An increase of one standard deviation in corruption increases the Gini coefficient of income inequality by about 11 points and income growth of the poor by about 5 percentage points per year. These findings are robust to use of different instruments for corruption and other sensitivity analyses. The paper discusses several channels through which corruption may affect income inequality and poverty. An important implication of these findings is that policies that reduce corruption will most likely reduce income inequality and poverty as well.

Why don't poor countries catch up? a cross-national test of an institutional explanation

Abstract: Early neoclassical analyses predicted that poor countries would grow faster than wealthy countries, because of technological advances and diminishing returns to capital in the latter. The reverse has occurred: poor countries are falling back rather than catching up. We suggest here that deficient institutions underlie this divergence. Employing various indicators of institutional quality, including the rule of law, the pervasiveness of corruption, and the risk of expropriation and contract repudiation, we show that the ability of poor countries to catch up is determined in large part by the institutional environment in which economic activity in these countries takes place. (JEL O00, O10)

Micro-Level Estimation of Poverty and Inequality

Abstract: Recent theoretical advances have brought income and wealth distributions back into a prominent position in growth and development theories, and as determinants of specific socio-economic outcomes, such as health or levels of violence. Empirical investigation of the importance of these relationships, however, has been held back by the lack of sufficiently detailed high quality data on distributions. Household surveys that include reasonable measures of income or consumption can be used to calculate distributional measures, but at low levels of aggregation these samples are rarely representative or of sufficient size to yield statistically reliable estimates. At the same time, census (or other large sample) data of sufficient size to allow disaggregation either have no information about income or consumption, or measure these variables poorly. This note outlines a statistical procedure to combine these types of data to take advantage of the detail in household sample surveys and the comprehensive coverage of a census. It extends the literature on small area statistics (Ghosh and Rao (1994), Rao (1999)) by developing estimators of population parameters that are nonlinear functions of the underlying variable of interest (here unit level consumption), and by deriving them from the full unit level distribution of that variable. In examples using Ecuadorian data, our estimates have levels of precision comparable to those of commonly used survey based welfare estimates—but for populations as small as 15,000 households, a ‘town.’ This is an enormous improvement over survey based estimates, which are typically only consistent for areas encompassing hundreds of thousands, even millions, of households. Experience using the method in South Africa, Brazil, Panama, Madagascar, and Nicaragua suggest that Ecuador is not an unusual case (Alderman et al. (2002), and Elbers et al. (2002)).

Financial institutions and markets across countries and over time - data and analysis

Abstract: This paper introduces the updated and expanded version of the Financial Development and Structure Database and presents recent trends in structure and development of financial institutions and markets across countries. The authors add indicators on banking structure and financial globalization. They find a deepening of both financial markets and institutions, a trend concentrated in high-income countries and more pronounced for markets than for banks. Similarly, the recent increase in cross-border lending and debt issues has been concentrated in high-income countries, while low and lower-middle income countries have experienced an increase in remittance flows. Low net interest margins, rising profitability and declining stability in high-income countries’ banking sectors characterize the recent financial sector boom in high income countries leading up to the global financial crisis of 2007.