The fourth volume of the World Bank Legal Review contains essays that examine how innovations in law, and efforts to empower the poor, can help achieve development objectives.
There are more than 1.1 million deaths per year from malaria, mostly among children less than five years old. The disease is preventable and curable with available technologies, but , in the absence of strong and sustained malaria control efforts, coverage with effective interventions is low, particularly among the poor. Malaria impairs economic growth and human development in many of the World Bank's client countries, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Bank has the capacity to do a lot more than it has in malaria control, including financing, policy advice, and implementation support. It will support countries to develop and implement programs to (i) cost-effectively reduce morbidity, productivity losses in multiple sectors, and mortality due to malaria, particularly among the poor and among children and pregnant women; and (ii) address the challenges of regional and global public goods.
The unanticipated spike in international food prices in 2007-08 hit many developing countries hard. This evaluation assesses the effectiveness of the World Bank Group response in addressing the short-term impacts of the food price crisis and in enhancing the resilience of countries to future shocks.
This publication is a compilation of reports on research projects initiated, under way, or completed in fiscal year 2001 (July 1, 2000 through June 30, 2001). The abstracts cover 150 research projects from the World Bank and grouped under 11 major headings including poverty and social development, health and population, education, labor and employment, environment, infrastructure and urban development, and agriculture and rural development. The abstracts detail the questions addressed, the analytical methods used, the findings to date and their policy implications. Each abstract identifies the expected completion date of each project, the research team, and reports or publications produced.
Private firms are at the forefront of the development process, providing more than 90 percent of jobs, supplying goods and services, and representing a significant source of tax revenues. Their ability to grow, create jobs, and reduce poverty depends critically on a well-functioning investment climate--defined as the policy, legal, and institutional arrangements underpinning the functioning of markets and the level of transaction costs and risks associated with starting, operating, and closing a business. The World Bank Group has provided extensive support to investment climate reforms. This evaluation by the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) assesses the relevance, effectiveness, and social value of World Bank Group support to investment climate reforms as it relates to concerns for inclusion and shared prosperity. IEG finds that the World Bank Group has supported a comprehensive menu of investment climate reforms and has improved investment climate in countries, as measured by number of laws enacted, streamlining of processes and time, or simple cost savings for private firms. However, the impact on investment, jobs, business formation, and growth is not straightforward. Regulatory reforms need to be designed and implemented with both economic and social costs and benefits in mind; IEG found that, in practice, World Bank Group support focuses predominantly on reducing costs to businesses. In supporting investment climate reforms, the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation use two distinct but complementary business models. Despite the fact that investment climate is the most integrated business unit in the World Bank Group, coordination is mostly informal, relying mainly on personal contacts. IEG recommends that the World Bank Group expand its range of diagnostic tools and integrate them in the areas of the business environment not yet covered by existing tools; develop an approach to identify the social effects of regulatory reforms on all groups expected to be affected by them beyond the business community; and exploit synergies by ensuring that World Bank and IFC staff improve their understanding of each other's work and business models.
The World Bank Group was a principal founding partner of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) in its pilot phase in 1991, and of the restructured GEF in 1994. The Bank plays three different roles in the GEF: (a) as trustee of the GEF and related trust funds, (b) as implementing agency, including the implementation of private-sector GEF projects by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), and (c) as the host organization of the functionally independent GEF secretariat. Focusing primarily on the role of the Bank as an implementing agency, this review documents how the partnership that the GEF and the World Bank Group established in the early 1990s has evolved over time, offers explanations for observed changes, and draws a number of lessons. The review addresses the following issues: * The mutual relevance of the World Bank Group and the GEF * Inter-organizational coordination along the World Bank Group-GEF project cycle * The introduction of the GEF’s resource allocation systems in 2006 and 2010 * The evolution and effectiveness of the Bank Group’s GEF portfolio * Catalytic approaches in the Bank Group-GEF partnership: co-financing, blending, and mainstreaming * The World Bank’s corporate activities as a GEF implementing agency. The principal purposes of this review are (a) to help improve the relevance and effectiveness of the Bank Group’s partnership with the GEF, and (b) to draw lessons for the Bank Group’s partnership with the GEF and other large global partnership programs.
World Bank Technical Paper No. 303.Reviews the design of 26 projects in Sub-Saharan Africa that were prepared by African governments and the World Bank for Bank funding. The report concludes that school-level factors need more attention in program design.
The World Bank Group A to Z provides ready-reference insight into the history, mission, organization, policies, financial services, and knowledge products of the world's largest anti-poverty institution.
Over the past decade the development community has focused more on measuring results, so the use of impact evaluations has expanded rapidly. IEG examines the relevance, quality, and influence of World Bank and IFC impact evaluations.
The World Bank Research Program. Abstracts of Current Studies is a compendium of research projects initiated, ongoing, or completed in fiscal years 2005 through 2007 (from July 1, 2004 through June 30, 2007).1 Each abstract summarizes the research questions, analytical methods used, and findings and policy implications, and describes the research team and publications produced. The volume also includes a complete list of research outputs produced by World Bank staff during this period. This research program generates knowledge that is an essential intellectual foundation of the World Bank's corporate strategies, lending, and policy advice. The research program is designed to increase understanding of the economic and social issues critical to the success of Bank operations, to inform policy dialogue, and to influence development thinking more generally. The World Bank has been a leader in development economics research and has also been the single most important source of data on economic development.
World Bank Discussion Paper 244. Although many studies have analyzed the gender gap in primary and secondary education in developing countries, this study is one of the few that analyzes the gap at the tertiary, or university level. The authors track the patterns in women's access to and achievement in higher education, including student enrollment and access to faculty and administrative positions. The study also identifies successful strategies and measures for reducing the gender gap. Two issues are examined in this paper. Part I reviews how women have fared in the wake of expanded tertiary enrollments over the past three decades. Despite evidence proving the importance of women's access to higher education for economic growth, a pervasive gap remains, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. The second part examines the World Bank's experience in projects designed to improve women's experience in higher education. The extent and severity of constraints varied across regions. Results are limited and many projects are still in progress. The findings suggest that countries with low per capita income levels and difficult social settings for women may have the greatest barriers to female participation. Even where social constraints are less severe, the programs for improving female education must respond to the demands of the labor market.
In 'At the Frontlines of Development' former World Bank country directors recount their experiences, both as managers of the World Bank's programs in global economic hotspots of the 1990s as well as throughout their careers in development economics. These essays detail, among many stories of development in the 1990s, how China and India lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, while Russia collapsed; how Bosnia and Herzegovina and Mozambique remade their war-ravaged economies; and how Thailand, Turkey, and Argentina fell into financial crisis. These remarkable stories, told in first-person by the country directors who were there to witness them, provide candid assessments of development in the 1990s'what succeeded, what failed, and what lessons emerged. This book is part of a larger effort undertaken by the World Bank to understand the development experience of the 1990s, an extraordinary eventful decade. Each of the project's three volumes serves a different purpose. 'Economic Growth in the 1990s' provides comprehensive analysis of the decade's development experience, while 'Development Challenges in the 1990s' offers insights on the practical concerns faced by policymakers.
The G20 had made enhancing cross-border payments a priority. Faster, cheaper, more transparent and more inclusive cross-border payment services have the potential to be transformative for citizens and economies across the world. The Roadmap for Enhancing Cross-Border Payments, launched in 2020, is the first attempt by the international community to address the challenges faced by cross-border payments in a holistic way. A key foundational element in the Roadmap was the publication by the FSB of 11 quantitative targets to define the Roadmap’s aims and create accountability. Technical Assistance (TA) plays a critical role in helping achieve the Roadmap targets. TA relates closely to, and builds on, the IMF’s and World Bank’s respective missions. This paper outlines a multi-year strategy to provide TA in order to meet the cross-border payments targets. The paper (1) details the important role TA plays in achieving the Roadmap targets; (2) summarizes stocktakes conducted by the IMF and World Bank of recent and ongoing TA supporting cross-border payments; and (3) explains the IMF’s and World Bank’s approaches to cross-border payments TA. The IMF and World Bank commit to collaborating, coordinating, and complementing each other on cross-border payments TA wherever possible and appropriate at country/project level.
Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are long-term contracts between a private party and a government agency that strive to provide a public asset or service in which the private party bears both some risk and some management responsibility. If implemented well, PPPs can help overcome inadequate infrastructure that constrains economic growth, particularly in developing countries. The use of PPPs has increased in the last two decades; they are now used in more than 134 developing countries, contributing about 15-20 percent of total infrastructure investment. The World Bank Group has expanded its support to PPPs through a wide range of instruments and services. During the last 10 years, its support has increased about threefold, to nearly $3 billion per year. The Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) assesses how effective the World Bank Group has been in helping countries use PPPs. In the evaluation, IEG examines the relevance of Bank Group support, how successful projects were, how the Bank Group coordinated support among its business lines (support to the public sector versus the private sector), and how it compares with the experience of other multilateral development banks with PPP support. IEG distills lessons to apply to the Bank Group's support of PPPs. Finally, IEG presents six recommendations that apply to both the organizational and the operational aspects of this work.
The unanticipated spike in international food prices in 2007-08 hit many developing countries hard. International prices for food and other agricultural products increased by more than 100 percent between early 2007 and mid-2008. Prices for food cereals more than doubled; and those for rice doubled in the space of just a few months. The food price increases were particularly hard on the poor and near-poor in developing countries, many of whom spend a large share of their income on food and have limited means to cope with price shocks. An estimated 1.29 billion people in 2008 lived on less than $1.25 a day, equivalent to 22.4 percent of the developing world population. In addition, the Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that 923 million people were undernourished in 2007. Simulation models suggested that poverty rose by 100-200 million people and the undernourished increased by 63 million in 2008. The World Bank organized rapidly for short-term support in the crisis, launching a fast-track program of loans and grants, the Global Food Crisis Response Program (GFRP). The GFRP mainly targeted low-income countries, and provided detailed policy advice to governments and its own staff on how to respond to the crisis. The Bank also scaled up lending for agriculture and social protection to support the building of medium-term resilience to future food price shocks. The International Finance Corporation responded by sharply increasing access to liquidity for agribusinesses and agricultural traders in the short and medium term, as well as new programs to improve incentives for agricultural market participants. This evaluation assesses the effectiveness of the World Bank Group response in addressing the short-term impacts of the food price crisis and in enhancing the resilience of countries to future shocks.
The World Bank Group is currently engaged in reflection and debate on how to improve the delivery of development support. Part of this debate concerns strengthening the knowledge agenda. The findings of this evaluation are particularly relevant because they speak directly to questions that the institution is deliberating. In particular, they address four key aspects of the “science of delivery†?: the role of local partners or local knowledge hubs; consultation with clients and other stakeholders in the process of designing knowledge services; delivery of knowledge on issues that are relevant to the client; and improving the way the Bank Group learns from upper-middle-income countries and intermediating this knowledge to other countries. The evaluation assesses knowledge-based activities in nine country programs selected from 48 knowledge-intensive programs supported by the Bank Group. It identifies the factors in the success or failure of those activities as they contribute to policy making or development outcomes. It also identifies areas of strength for the Bank Group as well as areas of weakness or risk. The main objective of the evaluation is to learn lessons from practices in a focus group of high-income and upper-middle-income countries that have knowledge-based programs with the Bank Group. The findings have implications for the Bank Group’s knowledge work, including governance and incentives. Over the past 15 years, Bank Group country programs have shifted toward more intensive delivery of knowledge services relative to lending, and this trend is expected to continue. The evaluation was done on economic and sector work and non-lending technical assistance activities selected from a purposive sample of knowledge-intensive country programs. In addition, the evaluation assessed International Finance Corporation Advisory Services for their synergy with the Bank’s analytical and advisory activities. The lessons from this evaluation could help leverage the Bank Group’s global knowledge to meet the needs of countries that mainly rely on knowledge services and are not pressed for financing.
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