The World Bank's Independent Evaluation Group examined the Bank's experience in disaster prevention and response over the past 20 years and found that the scale of Bank operations has grown over the period. The report found that the Bank has demonstrated considerable flexibility in its approach, but actions have tended to be more reactive than proactive, with disaster response taking more of the focus than preventative measures.

Presents a review of World Bank support for lines of credit, channeled through local financial institutions in client countries. This book finds that the Bank's own guidelines have not been followed and that the outcomes are poor.

The need to promote increased trade, prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, and ensure adequate water resources are some of the development challenges generating interest in increased regional and sub-regional cooperation. This evaluation seeks to provide guidance on when it is desirable for the Bank to support activities on a regional level, and assesses the effectiveness of both regional programs and the Banks role in supporting them. It comes at a time of increasing interest in regional development programs, supported by recent theoretical work on regional public goods and regional trading...

Middle income countries (MICs) are facing rapidly evolving development challenges as their economist mature and integrate into the global economy. As a group, the 86 MICs account for about one-fifth of world output, and their per capita income has grown by almost 4 percent annually since 1995. Yet there are still home to one-third of the world's poorest citizens, living on less than $2 per day. The World Bank has provided US$163 billion in loans to these countries since 1995 and it allocates about half of its administrative budget to working with them. Today, as a group these countries have...

A growing number of governments are working to improve their performance by creating systems to measure and help them understand their performance. These systems for monitoring and evaluation (M and E) are used to measure the quantity, quality and targeting of the goods and services - the outputs - that the state provides, and to measure the outcomes and impacts resulting from these outputs. These systems are also a vehicle to facilitate understanding of the causes of good and poor performance. This volume begins by focusing on exactly what monitoring and evaluation has to offer to...

This evaluation assesses the development effectiveness of the World Bank's lending and non-lending assistance to the Russian Federation since 1991, a 10-year period of tumultuous political, economic, and social change. This report concludes that an assistance strategy, concentrating on analytical and advisory services with limited financial support for Russia, would have been more appropriate than one involving large volumes of adjustment lending.