Evaluating the Evaluators: When and How Does the World Bank Evaluate Its Projects in the Western Balkans

The World Bank is one of the leading organizations in the evaluation of development projects. It also makes results and methods more and more transparent. This paper uses the information to ‘evaluate’ the evaluator. We collect project evaluations of the World Bank in the Western Balkan for a period of ten years. We use this information to investigate the determinants of a) whether or not an evaluation has happened and b) what drives the results. We find that projects in poorer and less democratic countries are more likely to be evaluated. Once we control for this selection we also find that the evaluation scores for the bank and the partner institutions are correlated. We draw some normative conclusions on whether or not the World Bank should change its strategy of evaluation.