Interview with Xavier Gine, Lead Economist within the World Bank Research Department (DEC). 1/ What do we know about index insurance after about 10 years of experience? There has been a lot of research around the question of take-up and impact of index insurance . Despite the potentially large welfare benefits, voluntary take-up of index insurance products has been rather limited so far. Explanations for this low demand could include: The first reason is that the product may be expensive , relative to the existing risk coping strategies. After all, when it is not subsidized as is the case for...

Albert Einstein once remarked "if I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it." Good advice, but unfortunately all too often forgotten. The British post office (Royal Mail) at one point tried to improve its next-day delivery rate from 98 to 99%, in an attempt to improve customer perception of its services. The effort nearly broke the organization, while it would have taken much less effort and resources to simply tell the UK public about the post office's current performance -- surveys showed people thought it was...