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Welfare and Climate Risks in Coastal Bangladesh: The Impacts of Climatic Extremes on Multidimensional Poverty and the Wider Benefits of Climate Adaptation
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-03-23)It is widely recognized that climate hazards impact the poor disproportionately. However, quantifying these disproportionate hazard impacts on a large scale is difficult given limited information on households’ location and socioeconomic characteristics, and incomplete quantitative frameworks to assess welfare impacts on households. This paper constructs a household-level multidimensional poverty index using a synthetic household dataset of 43 million people residing in the coastal zone of Bangladesh. Households are spatially linked to the critical infrastructure networks they depend on, including housing; water, sanitation, and hygiene; electricity; education; and health services. Combined with detailed cyclone hazard data, the paper first quantifies risks to households, agriculture, and infrastructure. It then presents a novel framework for translating critical infrastructure impacts into the temporary incidence of service deprivations, which can contribute to temporary deprivations and hence multidimensional poverty. The paper uses this framework to evaluate the benefits of various adaptation options. The findings show that asset risk due to flooding is US$483 million per year at present, increasing to US$750 million per year in 2050 under climate change. Households face an average infrastructure service disruption of two days per year, which is expected to increase to 4.6 days per year in 2050. This, in turn, would incur a temporary increase in multidimensional poverty (7.2 percent of people are multidimensionally poor at the baseline) of up to 94 percent (2.9 million people) 30 days after an extreme cyclone event (a 1-in-100 years event) at present and 153.9 percent (4.8 million people) in the future. The paper quantifies the large welfare benefits of upgrading embankments, showing how apart from significant risk reduction, these interventions reduce service disruptions by up to 70 percent in some areas and can help up to 1.6 million (0.23 million under current and proposed programs) people from experiencing some form of temporary poverty. Overall, the paper identifies poor households exposed to climate impacts, as well as those prone to falling into poverty temporarily, both of could help to mainstream equity considerations in new adaptation programs. -
Publication
From Good to Great in Indian Tertiary Education: Realizing the Promise of the National Education Policy
(World Bank, Washington DC, 2023-03-23)India has one of the largest and fastest-growing tertiary education systems in the world. The system enrolls 37 million students across nearly 50,000 institutions. The recently endorsed National Education Policy (NEP) aims at a further doubling of the gross enrollment ratio in higher education from 26.3 percent to 50 percent by 2035. Despite its size and growth rate, and the emphasis placed on tertiary education by Indian policymakers in recent times, the system has faced continuous challenges of equitable access, quality, governance, and financing, with the quality of inputs and outputs not keeping pace with the expansion of the sector. The World Bank has supported tertiary education in India through a series of engagements in technical education at the national level, and general tertiary education in specific states. The NEP’s proposal for broad-based tertiary education reforms as a key step toward transforming the tertiary education sector in India aligns with the Bank’s global tertiary education strategy and presents an opportunity for the Bank’s engagement in this area through analytic work, dialogue with key stakeholders, and strategic engagement with states and tertiary education institutions. Based on this analysis, the World Bank in 2020-2021 expanded its engagement in Indian tertiary education through dedicated analytical and advisory work in the NEP context. Focusing on the areas of access and equity, employability, digitalization, internationalization, academic careers, governance, funding, as well as quality assurance, the World Bank conducted a series of virtual events and prepared technical reports discussing the status quo in Indian tertiary education in the context of the proposed NEP reforms and international trends. The report at hand provides a summary of the outcomes of this work. -
Publication
Institutional Trust, Perceptions of Distributive Unfairness, and Income across Salvadoran Municipalities
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-03-23)Using multiple waves of two public opinion surveys and a two-way fixed effect model, this paper analyzes how people’s perceptions and attitudes towards public institutions shifted with the business cycle in El Salvador during 2004–2018. It finds that individuals’ levels of trust toward both the president and the municipal government are positively associated with higher levels of income at the municipality level. Income is also a strong predictor of trust in mass media, confidence in the judicial system and, to a lesser extent, trust in the national legislature but income does not affect trust in the Catholic Church. The relationship between income and trust toward the president and municipalities masks a relevant heterogeneity from a rural-urban divide as well as from differences in municipal state capacity. Further, views of income distribution fairness as well as preferences for democracy are positively shaped by municipality-specific business cycles. In contrast, neither generalized trust nor satisfaction with democracy is empirically associated with income at the municipality level. -
Publication
Leaning in at Home: Women's Promotions and Intra-household Bargaining in Bangladesh
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-03-23)It is established that entering employment improves a woman's bargaining position in the household. This paper investigates whether a woman's career advancement further improves her intra-household bargaining power. The analysis exploits quasi-random participation in a career promotion program in Bangladesh's garment industry to causally estimate the impact of women's promotion on household decision-making. The findings show that women who participate in the promotion program gain bargaining power as measured by higher expenditures on women (51%) and girls (74%), and on remittances (58%). The promotion-related income effect only partially explains these increases, suggesting that women gain more agency over household income more generally. Further, these new female managers now serve as role models to their staff. The paper finds that the direct effects spill over to women who are quasi-randomly exposed to the new female managers, who also report more say in household decisions. Complementarities between women's positions in the workplace and in the household appear important. -
Publication
Doing Business in the European Union 2021: Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands (with focus on the Netherlands)
(Washington DC, 2023-03-23)Doing Business provides objective measures of business regulations and their enforcement across one hundred ninety-one economies. It is founded on the principle that economic activity benefits from clear rules: rules that allow voluntary exchanges between economic actors, set out strong property rights, facilitate the resolution of commercial disputes, and provide contractual partners with protections against arbitrariness and abuse. This report highlights divergences in regulatory performance including in the implementation of the regulatory framework at the local level among ten Dutch cities. It analyzes the regulatory hurdles faced by entrepreneurs and suggests ways to make it easier to do business across the five areas benchmarked by providing good practice examples from the Netherlands and other EU member states.