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Making Public Sector Reforms Work : Political and Economic Contexts, Incentives, and StrategiesSupporting effective public sector reform is a major challenge that the World Bank and other agencies and stakeholders have been grappling with. It is increasingly recognized that political economy factors play a crucial role. However, beyond this broad proposition, specific questions arise: What country contexts are more/less propitious for public sector reforms and what reforms are likely to succeed where? And can more explicitly taking political economy challenges into account help to pursue public sector reforms even in less propitious contexts? This paper addresses these issues in two ways: first, it draws on the existing literature to identify key propositions about factors that can trigger or facilitate public sector reforms, and those that tend to work against (successful) reforms. Second, it investigates the experience of World Bank public sector operations over the decade 2000-2010. It finds that governments in many developing countries face incentives to initiate public sector reforms, but that at the implementation stage, political costs frequently outweigh potential gains; and hence reforms are abandoned or left to wither. Real breakthroughs have been achieved in countries experiencing major structural shifts and those having political leadership committed to higher-level goals. The review of operations shows that successful projects are significantly more widespread than the literature would lead to assume. Furthermore, it provides tentative evidence that investing in understanding political economy drivers has been associated with better project performance. Key implications are the need to differentiate between country contexts more clearly ex ante, concentrate more on reform implementation during windows of opportunity that are typically of limited duration, and design reforms with a clear plan of engagement with stakeholder incentives.
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Development Economics through the
 Decades : A Critical Look at 30 Years of the World
 Development ReportThe World Development Report (WDR) has
 become such a fixture that it is easy to forget the
 circumstances under which it was born and the Bank's
 motivation for producing such a report at that time. In the
 first chapter of this essay, the authors provide a brief
 background on the circumstances of newly independent
 developing countries and summarize some of the main strands
 of the emerging field of development economics. This
 backdrop to the genesis of the WDR accounts for the
 orientation of the earlier reports. The thinking on
 development in the 1960s and 1970s also provides a baseline
 from which to view the evolution that has occurred since.
 From the coverage in the second chapter, the authors isolate
 a number of key issues common to several or all of the WDRs,
 and the author examine these issues individually at greater
 length in third chapter. The discussion in third chapter,
 which builds on the material in the WDRs, presents some
 views about how far development thinking and, relatedly,
 policy making have advanced relative to 30 years ago. It
 asks whether promoting growth, building institutions,
 tackling inequality and poverty, making aid effective, and
 defining the role of the state have been rendered more
 tractable policy wise by the knowledge encapsulated in the
 WDRs. Chapter four looks ahead and points to some of the big
 challenges that the Bank might explore through future WDRs
 and the value it can add through the knowledge acquired from
 its cross-country operations and research.
-
Development Economics through the
 DecadesThe World Development Report (WDR) has
 become such a fixture that it is easy to forget the
 circumstances under which it was born and the Bank's
 motivation for producing such a report at that time. In the
 first chapter of this essay, the authors provide a brief
 background on the circumstances of newly independent
 developing countries and summarize some of the main strands
 of the emerging field of development economics. This
 backdrop to the genesis of the WDR accounts for the
 orientation of the earlier reports. The thinking on
 development in the 1960s and 1970s also provides a baseline
 from which to view the evolution that has occurred since.
 From the coverage in the second chapter, the authors isolate
 a number of key issues common to several or all of the WDRs,
 and the author examine these issues individually at greater
 length in third chapter. The discussion in third chapter,
 which builds on the material in the WDRs, presents some
 views about how far development thinking and, relatedly,
 policy making have advanced relative to 30 years ago. It
 asks whether promoting growth, building institutions,
 tackling inequality and poverty, making aid effective, and
 defining the role of the state have been rendered more
 tractable policy wise by the knowledge encapsulated in the
 WDRs. Chapter four looks ahead and points to some of the big
 challenges that the Bank might explore through future WDRs
 and the value it can add through the knowledge acquired from
 its cross-country operations and research.