Good Countries or Good Projects? Macro and Micro Correlates of World Bank Project Performance
By Cevdet A. Denizer, Daniel A. Kaufmann, Aart C. Kraay. 2011
211 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The authors use data from more than 6,000 World Bank projects evaluated between 1983 and 2009 to investigate macro and micro correlates of project outcomes. They find that country-level"macro"measures of the quality of policies and institutions are very strongly correlated with project outcomes, confirming the importance of country-level performance for the effective use of aid resources. However, a striking feature of the data is that the success of individual development projects varies much more within countries than it does between countries. The authors assemble a large set of project-level"micro"correlates of project outcomes in an effort to explain some of this within-country variation. They find that measures of project size, the extent of project supervision, and evaluation lags are all significantly correlated with project outcomes, as are early-warning indicators that flag problematic projects during the implementation stage. They also find that measures of World Bank project task manager quality matter significantly for the ultimate outcome of projects. They discuss the implications of these findings for donor policies aimed at aid effectiveness.
Subfields: Development, Safety Research, Strategy and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/196881c205461834ff0d9c464f1bd4688144fe2c
Citations in the corpus
- Tax Capacity and Growth: Is There a Tipping Point? (2016, unknown): “A more recent study by Denizer, Kaufmann, and Kraay (2013) examines the effectiveness of World Bank–funded projects and finds that over the past 25 years, these projects have performed better in well-governed countries.”
- Aid on Demand: African Leaders and the Geography of China's Foreign Assistance (2015, unknown): “Previous research suggests the bulk of the variation in project success to be at the project- rather than the country-level (Denizer et al. 2013).”