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.

The Worldwide Governance Indicators : Methodology and Analytical Issues

Abstract: This paper summarizes the methodology of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) project, and related analytical issues. The WGI cover over 200 countries and territories, measuring six dimensions of governance starting in 1996: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. The aggregate indicators are based on several hundred individual underlying variables, taken from a wide variety of existing data sources. The data reflect the views on governance of survey respondents and public, private, and NGO sector experts worldwide. The WGI also explicitly report margins of error accompanying each country estimate. These reflect the inherent difficulties in measuring governance using any kind of data. Even after taking these margins of error into account, the WGI permit meaningful cross-country and over-time comparisons. The aggregate indicators, together with the disaggregated underlying source data, are available at www.govindicators.org.

Law, finance, and firm growth

Abstract: We investigate how differences in legal and financial systems affect firms' use of external financing to fund growth. We show that in countries whose legal systems score high on an efficiency index, a greater proportion of firms use long-term external financing. An active, though not necessarily large, stock market and a large banking sector are also associated with externally financed firm growth. The increased reliance on external financing occurs in part because established firms in countries with well-functioning institutions have lower profit rates. Government subsidies to industry do not increase the proportion of firms relying on external financing. THE CORPORATE FINANCE LITERATURE suggests that market imperfections, caused by conflicts of interest and informational asymmetries between corporate insiders and investors, constrain firms in their ability to fund investment projects. The magnitude of these imperfections depends in part on the effectiveness of the legal and financial systems. Because these systems differ across countries, the literature implies that there should exist systematic cross-country differences in firms' ability to obtain external capital to finance investment. In this paper, we examine whether the underdevelopment of legal and financial systems does prevent firms in some countries from investing in potentially profitable growth opportunities. In particular, we focus on the use of long-term debt or external equity to fund growth (see our earlier work, Demirgut-Kunt and Maksimovic (1996a), which compares firms' financial structures in developed and developing countries and finds the greatest difference to be in the provision of long-term credit). We estimate a financial planning model to obtain the maximum growth rate that each firm in our thirty-country sample could attain without access to long-term financing. We then compare these predicted growth rates to growth rates realized by firms in countries with differing degrees of development in their legal and financial systems. Our approach enables us to identify specific characteristics of the legal and financial systems that are associated with long-term financing of firm growth. Thus, we provide a micro-level test of the hypoth

Who Gives Foreign Aid to Whom and Why

Abstract: This paper studies the pattern of allocation of foreign aid from various donors to receiving countries. We find considerable evidence that the direction of foreign aid is dictated by political and strategic considerations, much more than by the economic needs and policy performance of the recipients. Colonial past and political alliances are the major determinants of foreign aid. At the margin, however, countries that democratize receive more aid, ceteris paribus. While foreign aid flows respond more to political variables, foreign direct investments are more sensitive to economic incentives, particularly property rights in the receiving countries. We also uncover significant differences in the behavior of different donors.

World Health Organization reference values for human semen characteristics

Abstract: BACKGROUND Semen quality is taken as a surrogate measure of male fecundity in clinical andrology, male fertility, reproductive toxicology, epidemiology and pregnancy risk assessments. Reference intervals for values of semen parameters from a fertile population could provide data from which prognosis of fertility or diagnosis of infertility can be extrapolated. METHODS Semen samples from over 4500 men in 14 countries on four continents were obtained from retrospective and prospective analyses on fertile men, men of unknown fertility status and men selected as normozoospermic. Men whose partners had a time-to-pregnancy (TTP) of < or =12 months were chosen as individuals to provide reference distributions for semen parameters. Distributions were also generated for a population assumed to represent the general population. RESULTS The following one-sided lower reference limits, the fifth centiles (with 95th percent confidence intervals), were generated from men whose partners had TTP < or = 12 months: semen volume, 1.5 ml (1.4-1.7); total sperm number, 39 million per ejaculate (33-46); sperm concentration, 15 million per ml (12-16); vitality, 58% live (55-63); progressive motility, 32% (31-34); total (progressive + non-progressive) motility, 40% (38-42); morphologically normal forms, 4.0% (3.0-4.0). Semen quality of the reference population was superior to that of the men from the general population and normozoospermic men. CONCLUSIONS The data represent sound reference distributions of semen characteristics of fertile men in a number of countries. They provide an appropriate tool in conjunction with clinical data to evaluate a patient's semen quality and prospects for fertility.

Capital Structures in Developing Countries

Abstract: This study uses a new data set to assess whether capital structure theory is portable across countries with different institutional structures. We analyze capital structure choices of firms in 10 developing countries, and provide evidence that these decisions are affected by the same variables as in developed countries. However, there are persistent differences across countries, indicating that specific country factors are at work. Our findings suggest that although some of the insights from modern finance theory are portable across countries, much remains to be done to understand the impact of different institutional features on capital structure choices. OUR KNOWLEDGE OF CAPITAL STRUCTURES has mostly been derived from data from developed economies that have many institutional similarities. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the capital structure choices made by companies from developing countries that have different institutional structures. The prevailing view, for example Mayer ~1990!, seems to be that financial decisions in developing countries are somehow different. Mayer is the most recent researcher to use aggregate f low of funds data to differentiate between financial systems based on the “Anglo-Saxon” capital markets model and those based on a “Continental-German-Japanese” banking model. However, because Mayer’s data comes from aggregate f low of funds data and not from individual firms, there is a problem with this approach. The differences between private, public, and foreign ownership structures have a profound inf luence on such data, but the differences may tell us little about how profit-oriented firms make their individual financial decisions. This paper uses a new firm-level database to examine the financial structures of firms in a sample of 10 developing countries. Thus, this study helps determine whether the stylized facts we have learned from studies of developed countries apply only to these markets, or whether they have more general applicability. Our focus is on answering three questions: