What makes some policies work while others fail? The World Development Report 2017: Governance and the Law (external link) aims to answer this fundamental question. Two members of the development team, economists at the World Bank, will hold a public presentation of the report.

Released in January, the report discusses challenges faced by today’s developing countries and the processes of effective policymaking and implementation. The report considers the questions: Why are carefully designed, sensible policies too often not adopted or implemented? When they are, why do they often fail to generate development outcomes such as security, growth and equity? And why do some bad policies endure?

Participants include:

• Luís-Felipe López-Calva, co-director, World Development Report 2017, lead economist, Poverty and Equity Global Practice, World Bank
• Ezequiel Molina Ph.D. ’14, team member, World Development Report 2017, economist, Education Global Practice, World Bank
• Discussant: Jennifer Widner, director, Innovations for Successful Societies; professor of politics and international affairs, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University
• Discussion Chair: Carles Boix, chapter adviser, World Development Report 2017, Robert Garrett Professor in Politics; professor of politics and public affairs, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University

López-Calva’s publications and research interests focus on labor markets, poverty and inequality, institutions and development economics. Prior to his co-director position, he was lead economist and regional poverty advisor in the Europe and Central Asia region, and until 2013 was lead economist in the Poverty, Equity and Gender Unit in the Latin America and Caribbean PREM Directorate at the World Bank. López-Calva served as chief economist for Latin America and the Caribbean at the United Nations Development Program from 2007 to 2010.

Molina works on issues of institutional reform and service delivery with research spanning the areas of governance, education, gender and poverty and inequality. His recent publications include a systematic review on the effectiveness of social accountability interventions and a paper assessing the quality of service delivery in sub-Saharan Africa. He also has co-authored the book “Economic Polarization, Institutions and Conflict” in Latin America.

The World Bank Group has two major goals: to decrease the percentage of people living with less than $1.90 a day to no more than 3 percent by 2030, and to promote income growth of the bottom 40 percent of the population in each country.