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.

Social Capital and the Quality of Government: Evidence from the United States

Abstract: Social capital - in the form of general trust and strong civil norms that call for cooperation when large-scale collective action is needed - can improve government performance in three ways: 1) It can broaden government accountability, making government responsive to citizens at large, rather than to narrow interests. 2) It can facilitate agreement where political preferences are polarized. 3) It is associated with greater innovation when policymakers face new challenges. Consistent with these arguments, Putnam (1993) has shown that regional governments in the more trusting, more civic-minded northern, and central parts of Italy provide public services more effectively than do those in the less trusting, less civic-minded southern regions. Using cross-country data, La Porta and others (1997), and Knack and Keefer (1997), obtained findings consistent with Putnam's evidence. For samples of about thirty nations (represented in the World Value Surveys), they found that societies with greater trust tended to have governments that performed significantly better. The authors used survey measures of citizen confidence in government as well as subjective indicators of bureaucratic inefficiency. The author further analyzes links between social capital and government performance, using data for the United States. In states with more social capital (as measured by an index of trust, volunteering, and census response), government performance is rated higher, based on ratings constructed by the Government Performance Project. This result is highly robust to including a variety of control variables, considering the possibility of influential outlying values, treating the performance ratings as ordinal, rather than cardinal, and correcting for possible endogeneity.

A new database on human capital stock : sources, methodology and results

Abstract: The authors describe the techniques and data adopted for the construction of a new series of estimates of the stock of education in 85 countries over 28 years (1960-87). It covers all the important developing regions except the republics of the former Soviet Union. The International Economics Department (IEC) continues a well-established trend in growth research of using educational stock (measured as mean school years of education of the labor force) as a proxy for human capital. The series are built from enrollment data using the perpetual inventory method, adjusted for mortality. Estimates are corrected for grade repetition among school-goers and country-specific drop-out rates for primary and secondary students. Enrollment data series used start as far back as 1930 for most countries, and even earlier for others. This reduces the need for backward extrapolation of enrollments to provide the initial estimates of the investment inventory.

Agricultural Extension: Good Intentions and Hard Realities

Abstract: This article provides a framework outlining farmers demand for information, the public goods character of extensions services, and the organizational and the political attributes affecting the performance of extension systems This conceptual framework is used to analyze several extensions modalities and their likely and actual effectiveness The analysis highlights the efficiency gains that can come from locally decentralized delivery system with incentive structures based on largely private provision, although in poorer countries extension services will remain funded The goals of agricultural extension includes transferring information from the global knowledge base and from local research to farmers, enabling them to clarify their own goals and possibilities, educating them on how to make better decisions, and stimulating desirable agricultural development