research<sup>8</sup> in that it is a knowledge product meant to address specific questions of client countries. This client-demand-driven approach aims to support the development of country strategies and helps with the formulation and implementation of lending programs. While ESW involves research and analysis and is meant to inform policy choices, TA is mostly advisory. Nonetheless, technical advice on formulating and implementing policies and programs can result in report outputs; in most cases, however, it takes the form of the provision of TA, on demand advisory services, or training.

**For the purpose of our study we rely on the policy reports within the D&R database.** Documents & Reports is a database that contains more than 130,000 publically available World Bank documents.  We define policy reports as those documents within the D&R database that were filed as ESW.  These are either ESW or published TA reports. There have been, on average, 322 policy reports per year during the past five years of which around 250 were ESWs. This implies that approximately 52 percent of ESW projects do not have a corresponding report in the Documents & Reports (D&R) database. This is due to three factors.  First, not all ESW are designed to produce reports. Second, some reports are confidential. Though the World Bank’s current Access to Information policy presumes that ESW report will be immediately disclosed, some reports can be flagged as confidential (World Bank, 2010a; World Bank, 2013c).9 Third, some ESWs that have produced reports may not have been filed with the World Bank’s Internal Documents Unit (IDU).

**Many policy reports are part of a larger series with several budget codes.** In order to identify key characteristics of policy reports, such as producing unit, cross support received or costs, we merge information from the D&R database with the budget codes associated with the different reports. However, not all policy reports have a unique budget code. There are three distinct cases: First, multiple reports were funded under a single policy report.<sup>**10**</sup> In many cases there are only two or three reports under a single budget code, but in a few cases there are as many as 12 reports under a single budget code. Second, there are single reports that were funded under multiple budget codes.<sup>11</sup> Overall, there were 149 distinct codes that were aggregated into 66 policy reports. Third, there were multiple budget codes that were linked to multiple reports.  Some of the groupings reflected large thematic report series. Of the original 1,765 codes and the 2,020 reports, we are left with a dataset of 1,611 policy reports of which 1,331 are documents that were released under a single report number that was funded under a single code.

8 Public good research of the World Bank includes Open Data, Policy Research Working Papers, World Development Report, journal articles, and books, among other things.

9 Over the past 15 years, the World Bank’s policy on disclosing information has evolved gradually. Prior to 2010, the World Bank’s approach had been to spell out what documents the World Bank discloses. Under the World Bank Policy on Access to Information which became effective on July 1, 2010, the World Bank discloses any information in its possession that is not on a list of exceptions. Documents flagged as “official use only” are disclosed 5 years after preparation, while those flagged “confidential” or “strictly confidential” are disclosed after 20 years. Confidential reports, for example, include reports with information that has been provided by member countries in confidence or analysis that may affect financial marked behavior.

10 These were sometimes simply a single document that was translated into other languages and released under separate budget codes. For these reports, we created one aggregate report identifier since we could not distribute the expenditures linked to a project code across the multiple report numbers.

11 In April 2012, a Programmatic Approach for ESW and TA was introduced to organize AAA of multiple program activities and knowledge products that support a particular program, theme, or engagement area over several fiscal years (World Bank, 2012b). Since our data set is limited to fiscal year 2012, it does not include any reports categorized as programmatic AAA.

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