The WDR 2004 warns that broad improvements in human welfare would not occur un poor people receive wider access to affordable and improved services in health, education, water, sanitation, and electricity. It provides powerful examples of where services did work, showing how governments and citizens could do better. The on-going impact of the 2004 is four-fold. First, it has focused attention on the problem of service delivery, or public-expenditure efficiency more generally, as critical to achieving the Millennium Development Goals. Second, the WDR 2004’s analytical framework has been applied in regional and operational activities, including two regional reports from the LAC and ECA regions, several programmatic operations in Africa and South Asia and in the country assistance strategy of Indonesia. Third, the WDR 2004’s discussion of using budget-support aid to improve service delivery has had an impact not just in the Bank, which was already moving in this direction, but also in other donor agencies, especially DFID. Finally, the WDR 2004 made a strong pitch for increasing impact evaluation of service-delivery innovations in order to learn what to scale-up. This has given a boost to the Bank’s increased use of impact evaluations.
