Putting your money where your mouth is: Geographic targeting of World Bank projects to the bottom 40 percent.

The adoption of the shared prosperity goal by the World Bank in 2013 and Sustainable Development Goal 10, on inequality, by the United Nations in 2015 should strengthen the focus of development interventions and cooperation on the income growth of the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution. This paper contributes to the incipient literature on within-country allocations of development institutions and assesses the geographic targeting of World Bank projects to the bottom 40 percent. Bivariate correlations between the allocation of project funding approved over 2005-14 and the geographical distribution of the bottom 40 as measured by survey income or consumption data are complemented by regressions with population and other potential factors affecting the within-country allocations as controls.