Annual Review of Development Effectiveness 2008 : Shared Global Challenges

This year's annual review of development effectiveness focuses on assessing the World Bank's development effectiveness, with special attention to global public goods. It notes some encouraging developments. Project performance has improved over the medium term; country programs have worked relatively well in several large nations that house a majority of the world's poor; and the Bank has increased attention to collective international action on global public goods and advocated effectively on some of those important challenges. But work is required to remedy weaknesses. Notably there is a need to go beyond the Bank's country- based model when tackling issues where the perceived local and national benefits of action do not match global benefits from collective action. Attention should be paid to improving weak performance of country programs in smaller states and those with extensive poverty, and redressing shortcomings in applying monitoring and evaluation in projects and country programs. Over the next decade and beyond, the success of the international community and the World Bank Group in rising to the shared global challenges of our time will be crucial to reducing poverty and, indeed, to solving the looming challenges the world collectively faces.