The preparation of this book benefited greatly from the support and valuable contributions of many colleagues in the World Bank Institute and in other departments of the World Bank. The authors express their sincere appreciation to those World Bank experts who provided extremely useful comments, suggestions, and inputs during the drafting of this book: Vinod Thomas, John Middleton, Philip Karp, Carl Dahlman, Simon Commander, John Oxenham, Dusan Vujovic, Peter Miovic, Vladimir Kreacic, Kirk Hamilton, Ksenia Lvovsky, Magda Lovei, Tim Heleniak, Joanne Epp, and William Prince. Special thanks go to Development Education Program (DEP) team members for their warm support and close collaboration and to John Didier for his dedicated editing of the final text of the book.

The authors are also grateful to the Russian DEP project team, Vladimir Avtonomov, Andrei Mitskevitch, Sergei Ravichev, and Alexandre Kuznetsov, who provided their valuable advice while working on the national adaptation of this book published in Russian as The World and Russia.

The editing and the prepress production of this book was done by Communications Development Incorporated. The printing of the book was managed by our valued Russian partner, the St. Petersburg Institute, School of Economics.