World Development

Papers
(The median citation count of World Development is 5. The table below lists those papers that are above that threshold based on CrossRef citation counts [max. 250 papers]. The publications cover those that have been published in the past four years, i.e., from 2022-05-01 to 2026-05-01.)
ArticleCitations
Verdant vitality: forests benefit child health in China377
Spatial Inequality, Poverty and Informality in the Democratic Republic of the Congo184
Seeing the broader picture: Stakeholder contributions to understanding infrastructure impacts of the Interoceanic Highway in the southwestern Amazon151
Is the rising tide of specialty coffee lifting all boats?125
Wealth inequality and economic growth: Evidence from the World Inequality Database124
Infrastructure-driven land appropriation, institutional change and conflict in a communal conservancy in Kenya111
Gutenberg 2.0 − Academic publishing in the digital world110
Is the conventional wisdom on resource taxation correct? Mining evidence from African countries' tax legislations106
Gendering the safety net: Social protection policy and the limits to Decent Work in Cambodia’s garment sector105
Social gaps, perceived inequality and protests103
An institutional analysis of ‘power within’ local governance: A Bazaari tale from Pakistan96
Income inequality in Africa, 1990–2019: Measurement, patterns, determinants93
A supercyclone, landscapes of ‘emptiness’ and shrimp aquaculture: The lesser-known trajectories of disaster recovery in coastal Odisha, India83
Violent conflicts and learning outcomes: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa78
Avocados: Mexico’s green gold, drug cartel violence and the U.S. opioid crisis76
Introductory essay for special issue: future of work and welfare in India’s halting structural transition71
Cracks in the “gold standard”: The Eurocentrism of mining in development economics69
Violent instability and modern contraception: Evidence from Mali66
Social capital's role in mitigating economic vulnerability: Understanding the impact of income disparities on farmers' livelihoods65
What corruption is most harmful? Unbundling citizen perceptions64
The winds of inequalities: How hurricanes affect inequalities at the macro level63
Investigating the Inclusive-Performance Tradeoff in Agricultural Cooperatives: Evidence from Nepal62
The short-term effects of visa restrictions on migrants’ legal status and well-being: A difference-in-differences approach on Venezuelan displacement60
A behavioral approach to social security compliance targeting self-employed workers in Brazil59
How epidemics affect marginalized communities in war-torn countries: Ebola, securitization, and public opinion about the security forces in Liberia57
The role of the commodity price boom in shaping public social spending: Evidence from Latin America57
Discrimination in post-conflict settings: Experimental evidence from Colombia53
Cultivating inequality? Regional rubber dynamics and implications for voluntary sustainability programs in Lao PDR53
Climate change vulnerability and the resilience of energy consumption52
Decomposing the impacts of an agricultural value chain development project by ethnicity and gender in Nepal52
How wartime recruitment affects political engagement among civilians: Evidence from Côte d’Ivoire51
Representation matters? Female legislators and women’s health in Bangladesh50
Long-term impacts of school nutrition: Evidence from China’s school meal reform50
Historical bombings, urban community, and prosociality: Application of the First internet lab-in-the-field experiment49
Challenges of using PAR to promote collective action with denotified tribes in India: Surfacing intersections and tensions between religious and other inequalities49
Urban social movements and local state capacity48
On the distributional effects of principal-agent problems: Evidence from China’s shell farmer cooperatives48
Revisiting regional governance and regional development: Measurements, linkages and coupling effect47
Blended Binds: How DFI's support programs stifle bank lending in Africa44
Sanitation and work time: Evidence from the toilet revolution in rural China43
What do we know about rural and informal non-farming labour? Evidence from a mixed methods study of artisanal and small-scale mining in Northwest Tanzania42
Kinship, dadon and patronage politics: The role of informal institutions in climate adaptation42
Intergenerational effects of education on child mortality: Evidence from the compulsory primary schooling law in Vietnam41
Disaster mortalities and the Sendai Framework Target A: Insights from Zimbabwe40
Women’s Work – Routes to Social and Economic Empowerment: Introduction to the Special Issue40
The fiscal cost of conflict: Evidence from Afghanistan 2005–201739
Identity and conflict: Evidence from Tuareg rebellion in Mali39
Expectations, authority and divergent market transitions39
“I will sample until things get better – or until I die.” Potential and limits of citizen science to promote social accountability for environmental pollution38
Trade agreements and sustainable fisheries38
Female education and marriage in Pakistan: The role of financial shocks and marital customs37
Who communicates the information matters for technology adoption37
Does institutional design matter? Constitutional regime types and party system closure in Asia37
Who are the “vanguard” women? Strategies for identifying women going against economic participation norms across 49 low- and middle-income countries37
Policies for aspirations. And opportunities37
Cash transfers in the context of carbon pricing reforms in Latin America and the Caribbean36
The long-term health impact of Agent Orange: Evidence from the Vietnam War36
“I have already died in this PLACE:” livelihood impact pathways of conservation and land use change among highland Indigenous groups in northern Thailand36
Estimating the relationship between ethnic inequality, conflict and voter turnout in Africa using geocoded data36
Armed conflict, institutions and deforestation: A dynamic spatiotemporal analysis of Colombia 2000–201836
Oil revenues and labor market reforms36
Scaling up and scaling out of darkness: Elucidating the influences of institutional dysfunction in scaling up solar PV in Sub-Saharan Africa35
The role of developmental ‘buzzwords’ in the international refugee regime: Self-reliance, resilience, and economic inclusion35
Community and industrial forest concessions: Are they effective at reducing forest loss and does FSC certification play a role?35
Do remittances reshape household expenditures? Evidence from Nepal34
The poverty effect of democratization34
How are institutions included in Integrated Conservation and Development Projects? Developing and testing a diagnostic approach on the World Bank’s Forest and Community project in Salta, Argentina34
Criminal governance and public resources: The case of paramilitaries and health care provision in Colombia34
Studying economic black holes: Lessons from North Korea34
The impact of firm downsizing on workers: Evidence from Ethiopia’s ready-made garment industry33
Cash Transfers, Time Discounting, and Agricultural Inputs Utilization in Lesotho33
Child labor among farm households in Mozambique and the role of reciprocal adult labor33
The employment profile of cities around the world: Consumption vs. production cities and economic development33
Beyond Deforestation Reductions: Public Disclosure, Land-Use Change and Commodity Sourcing33
Electing governors: complexities of institutional design in Latin America’s unitary countries33
Climate stressors and rural incomes: multi-country evidence on wealth, gender, and age disparities33
Household fuel transitions have substantially contributed to child mortality reductions in China32
Aid effectiveness: Human rights as a conditionality measure32
Detailed geographic information, conflict exposure, and health impacts31
Mapping community development aid: Spatial analysis in Myanmar31
Leaving the hearth you know: Internal migration and energy poverty31
The BRI: A new development cooperation paradigm in the making? Unpacking China’s infrastructure cooperation along the Maritime Silk Road31
Adaptation to expected and unexpected weather fluctuations: Evidence from Bangladeshi smallholder farmers31
Impacts of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the global wheat market31
Fabricated justice: How due process reform enables evidence manipulation30
“Dream brokers” and the moral economy of frontier investments30
Editorial Board30
Gendered laws and Women’s financial inclusion30
Evidence and determinants of rural crime victimization in Tanzania29
Tracking Chinese aid through China Customs29
Protein pluralism and food systems transition: A review of sustainable protein meta-narratives29
Government data accessibility and firm dynamics: Encouraging entrepreneurship or accelerating exit?29
The effects of resource-backed loans on deforestation: Evidence from developing countries29
Deliberating towards development: A framework for co-constructing policies with people in poverty29
Revisiting the role of secondary towns: How different types of urban growth relate to poverty in Indonesia28
Armed conflict, community-based cash transfers, and social cohesion: Evidence from a randomized intervention in Ethiopia28
Illicit gains and state capture: Political party extortion in India and Pakistan28
Editorial Board28
Estimating dynamic macroeconomic effects of exogenous remittances28
Subway and entrepreneurship28
Customary courts, state institutions, or opting out: Patterns of forum pluralism in three African countries28
Decentralization, social connections and primary health care: Evidence from Kenya28
Institutional transition: Social cohesion and demand for land titles in urban Tanzania27
Is there a virtuous cycle between wages and productivity? Turkish experience after the transition to democracy27
Late-Arriving Votes and Electoral Fraud: A Natural Experiment and Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Bolivia26
Infrastructure Services and Early Childhood Development in Latin America and the Caribbean: Water, Sanitation, and Garbage Collection26
Satisfaction with water services delivery in South Africa: the effects of social comparison26
Unveiling the effect of income inequality on safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH): Does financial inclusion matter?26
Crowd in or crowd out? The subnational fiscal response to aid26
Gender and development in the agrarian south25
Introduction to special issue: The policy consequences of social movements25
The impact of community-based monitoring on public service delivery: A randomized control trial in Uganda25
How do forests contribute to food security following a weather shock? Evidence from Malawi25
Social protection and absorptive capacity: Disaster preparedness and social welfare policy in the United States25
Security fosters generosity: Social security protection and charitable giving25
Decentralization and the persistence of centralized power in Liberia25
Age and Agency: Evidence from a Women’s Empowerment Program in Tanzania24
How natural resource rents, exports, and government resource revenues determine Genuine Savings: Causal evidence from oil, gas, and coal24
Gender in development: What lessons for addressing inequality on the grounds of religion or (non)-belief?24
Religious affiliation, education, and fertility in sub-Saharan Africa24
Child poverty among refugees23
Violent Conflicts and Education: The LRA Insurgency in Northern Uganda Revisited23
REDD+: The perfect marriage between conservation and development? A comparative study of the impacts of REDD+ on livelihoods and deforestation in Tanzania23
Aid effectiveness and donor motives23
Life expectancy across countries: Convergence, divergence and fluctuations23
Commodity price fluctuations and child malnutrition23
The impact of an improvement in the quality and reliability of rural residential electricity supply on clean cooking fuel adoption: Evidence from six energy poor Indian states23
Temperature and risk of diarrhoea among children in Sub-Saharan Africa23
Strategizing actors and agents in the functioning of informal property Rights: The tragicomedy of the extralegal housing market in China23
Norms that matter: Exploring the distribution of women’s work between income generation, expenditure-saving and unpaid domestic responsibilities in India23
Everything, everywhere, all at once? Donor bureaucrats struggle with four dimensions of development effectiveness22
Can insurance catalyse government planning on climate? Emergent evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa22
Going local without localization: Power and humanitarian response in the Syrian war22
Does decentralization encourage pro-poor targeting? Evidence from Kenya’s constituencies development fund22
A qualitative examination of microfinance and intimate partner violence in India: Understanding the role of male backlash and household bargaining models22
Long-lasting consequences of being targeted22
Love Thy Neighbour? Social Attitudes Towards Persons With Disabilities22
Unlucky to have brothers: Sibling sex composition and girls’ locus of control22
Official vigilantism22
Status inequality and public goods21
Designing feasible anti-corruption strategies in the Nigerian health system: A latent class analysis of a discrete choice experiment21
Vote-buying, anti-corruption campaigns, and identity in African elections21
Resilience counter-currents: Water infrastructures, informality, and inequities in Cape Town, South Africa21
Market demand for and producer profits of certified safe cabbage: Evidence from test sales in traditional food markets in Northern Ghana21
Inventory credit to enhance food security in Burkina Faso21
Impacts of refugee influx on the local economy and environmental degradation in Bangladesh: A spatial multilevel autoregressive analysis21
Foreign aid in a divided country: Subnational aid allocations in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina21
Limiting aggressive policing can reduce police and civilian violence21
Editorial Board21
Editorial Board21
Trade policy reform, retail food prices and access to healthy diets worldwide20
Inclusive reforms as levers for social exclusion: The paradoxical consequences of quotas for women in rural India20
Decarbonisation and specialisation downgrading: The double harm of GVC integration20
Coping (more or less) with health shocks: A longitudinal perspective on financial protection from Nepal20
Clientelism, corruption and the rule of law20
Adoption and intensity of agricultural mechanization and their impact on non-farm employment of rural women20
Well-being costs of unpaid care: Gendered evidence from a contextualized time-use survey in India20
Contraception to women’s economic empowerment: A narrative review20
Turning poo into profit? The troubled politics of a biogas-based sanitation business model in Mozambique20
Taking off or putting on shoes?: Barefoot doctors, mental-manual labor, and the health revolution in Mao’s China20
Does economic complexity reduce the probability of a fiscal crisis?20
What resilience theory and praxis can learn from multi-dimensional approaches to understanding poverty: A study of Ghanaian cocoa forest landscapes19
Long COVID: The evolution of household welfare in developing countries during the pandemic19
Taming systemic corruption: The American experience and its implications for contemporary debates19
What will it mean to end poverty?19
Gray skies and blue moms: The effect of air pollution on parental life satisfaction19
Do trade agreements contribute to the decline in labor share? Evidence from Latin American countries19
Transnational partnerships, domestic institutions, and sustainable development. The case of Brazil and the Amazon Region Protected Areas program19
Climate adaptation policies and rural income: Evidence from social technologies in Brazil19
The shadow of the epidemic: Long-term impacts of meningitis exposure on risk preference and behaviors19
Trapped institutional change: the quest for regulating fishing activities in protected areas19
Corrigendum to “The perversion of public land distribution by landed elites: Power, inequality and development in Colombia” [World Development 136 (2020) 105036]19
Immiserizing growth and the middle-income trap in rural South East Asia: Comparing exclusion and coping mechanisms among farming and fishing communities19
Spatially heterogeneous effects of collective action on environmental dependence in Namibia’s Zambezi region19
Beyond Diversity: The Role of State Capacity in Fostering Social Cohesion in Brazil19
Claiming the city: Citizenship and political connections in African neighborhoods18
The impact of infrastructure investment on resilience to environmental shocks: Evidence from Ecuador18
When the data you have aren’t the data you need: The availability of school-related violence data in low- and middle-income countries18
Dutch disease and the resource curse: the progression of views from exchange rates to women’s agency and well-being18
Industrial clustering, income and inequality in rural China18
Beyond individualistic behaviour: Social norms and innovation adoption in rural Mozambique18
Murder nature: Weather and violent crime in rural Brazil18
Bringing contact interventions to the lab: Effects of brief bilateral discussions on interethnic trust in Senegal18
Overlapping extractive land use rights increases deforestation and forest degradation in managed natural production forests18
Transfers, nutrition programming, and economic well-being: Experimental evidence from Bangladesh18
Barriers or catalysts? Traditional institutions and social mobility in rural India17
Economic incentives and return migrant scholars: Evidence from a talent recruitment program in China17
Demand and supply constraints of credit in smallholder farming: Evidence from Ethiopia and Tanzania17
Establishing the link between internal and international migration: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa17
India’s premature deindustrialization and Falling investment rate in the 2010s17
Does aid to migrants in “transit countries” affect their movement intentions? Evidence from Libya17
Corrigendum to ‘‘Tracing China’s agrochemical complex” [World Dev. 181 (2024) 106675]17
Spillover Effects and Diffusion of Savings Groups17
Within the cracks of the cosmic race: Income inequalities by race and ethnicity in Latin America17
Labor law and workplace injuries17
Do gifts buy votes? Evidence from sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America17
Editorial Board17
Estimating the potential of international carbon markets to increase global climate ambition17
Sobriety, social capital, and village network structures17
Making concessions pay? Historical vs. potential tax revenues from Laos’s rubber sector17
Health consequences of small-scale industrial pollution: Evidence from the brick sector in Bangladesh17
Recidivism, Labor Markets, and Prison Conditions: Evidence from Uruguay17
Public services as carriers of ideas that (de-) legitimise the state: The illustrative case of free education in Sri Lanka17
Marginals within the marginalised: Exploring the changes in occupational pattern among Adivasi women in the context of land alienation in India17
Demand reduction campaigns for the illegal wildlife trade in authoritarian Vietnam: Ungrounded environmentalism16
Corrigendum to “Climate change, collective shocks, and intra-community cooperation: Evidence from a public good experiment with farmers and pastoralists” [World Dev. 189 (2025) 106941]16
Editorial Board16
Decentralization and local industrial policy in Mexico16
Unequal contributions to CO2 emissions along the income distribution within and between countries16
The sand curse: sand mining, environmental degradation and social conflicts in The Gambia16
Reducing energy poverty by nearly universal pension coverage of rural China16
Local context and mobilization in poor communities: Lessons from Kenya, Malawi and Zambia16
Reassessing transformation pathways: Global trends in rural household farm and non-farm livelihood strategies with a spotlight on Sub-Saharan Africa16
What procedures matter to social acceptance of mining? A conjoint experiment in Peru16
Editorial Board16
Editorial Board16
The impacts of climate change on agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa: A spatial panel data approach16
The effects of fiscal policy on households during the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from Thailand and Vietnam16
Restricting mothers’ international migration and human capital investment16
Who is asking and how? Effects of survey mode and enumerator gender on measuring women’s life experience16
Development of agroforestry food resources in Niger: Are farmers’ preferences context specific?16
Child nutrition: The effect of micro and macro fertility levels at birth15
Methodological lessons for negotiating power, political capabilities, and resilience in research on climate change responses15
Sub-national property tax reform and tax bargaining: Lessons from a quasi-randomized reform program in Sierra Leone15
Financial inclusion and roof quality: Satellite evidence from Chilean slums15
Healthcare reform and gender specific infant mortality in rural Nepal15
Women’s work in India: Evidence from changes in time use between 1998 and 201915
Short- and long-term food insecurity and policy responses in pandemics: Panel data evidence from COVID-19 in low- and middle-income countries15
Crush and Burn: How the destruction of ivory fails to save elephants15
Agricultural investment behaviour and contingency: Experimental evidence from Uganda15
Natives’ gender norms and the labor market integration of female immigrants15
A food insecurity Kuznets Curve?15
Contested forests: how transnational networks mitigate and reproduce conflict15
The role of mobile money in household resilience: Evidence from Kenya15
Revisit the one-time subsidies and long-run adoption of health products: Quasi-experimental evidence from providing free eyeglasses in rural China15
Financial cooperatives and poverty mitigation during Brazil’s lost decade15
Does Household Electrification Empower Rural Boys and Girls Alike? Evidence from Brazil15
The labor market integration of Syrian refugees in Turkey15
From fees to free: User fee removal, maternal health care utilization and child health in Zambia15
Editorial Board15
Ripples of reciprocity: Navigating trust and collective governance in hydrosocial territories15
Rural out-migration and water governance: Gender and social relations mediate and sustain irrigation systems in Nepal15
Clientelist politics in Nigeria: Core voters, control and compliance15
The hidden cost of global economic integration: How foreign investment drives military expenditures15
Unpacking the penetration of agrochemicals in China: The commodification of agricultural inputs and the invisible dispossession of smallholders15
Effective community mobilization: Evidence from Mali15
On Violent Conflict, Land Scarcity, and Power in an urban Frontier in Congo15
Immigration, labor markets and discrimination: Evidence from the Venezuelan Exodus in Perú15
Convergence in resource productivity15
Urban wild meat markets in Cameroon: Actors and motives15
0.23739886283875