The World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

The World Bank Open Knowledge Repository (OKR) is The World Bank’s official open access repository for its research outputs and knowledge products.

 

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Total publications: 38,379

Recently Added

  • Publication
    Design of Partial Population Experiments with an Application to Spillovers in Tax Compliance
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-02-07) Cruces, Guillermo; Tortarolo, Dario; Vazquez-Bare, Gonzalo
    This paper develops a framework to analyze partial population experiments, a generalization of the cluster experimental design where clusters are assigned to different treatment intensities. The framework allows for heterogeneity in cluster sizes and outcome distributions. The paper studies the large-sample behavior of OLS estimators and cluster-robust variance estimators and shows that (i) ignoring cluster heterogeneity may result in severely underpowered experiments and (ii) the cluster-robust variance estimator may be upward-biased when clusters are heterogeneous. The paper derives formulas for power, minimum detectable effects, and optimal cluster assignment probabilities. All the results apply to cluster experiments, a particular case of the framework. The paper sets up a potential outcomes framework to interpret the OLS estimands as causal effects. It implements the methods in a large-scale experiment to estimate the direct and spillover effects of a communication campaign on property tax compliance. The analysis reveals an increase in tax compliance among individuals directly targeted with the mailing, as well as compliance spillovers on untreated individuals in clusters with a high proportion of treated taxpayers.
  • Publication
    Protecting Paradise: Opportunities for Insurance to Support Marine-based and Coastal Tourism in the Caribbean
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-02-06) World Bank
    This report explores the case for introducing innovative insurance products for businesses within the tourism industry that leverage and conserve coastal and marine ecosystems. It presents an overview of the insurance market in the Caribbean, an analysis of the potential of insurance products to protect natural assets, and a consideration of international examples to be applied in the region. Insurance has great potential to mitigate disaster risk, but realizing this potential will require investing in education to expand insurance uptake, drawing lessons from prior experiences, minimizing financial burdens, exploring new products and types of insurance, ensuring that solutions are scalable, and improving quantitative tools and data.
  • Publication
    Dynamic, High-Resolution Poverty Measurement in Data-Scarce Environments
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-02-06) Zheng, Zhuo; Wu, Timothy; Lee, Richard; Newhouse, David; Kilic, Talip; Burke, Marshall; Ermon, Stefano; Lobell, David B.
    Accurate and comprehensive measurement of household livelihoods is critical for monitoring progress toward poverty alleviation and targeting social assistance programs for those who most need it. However, the high cost of traditional data collection has historically made comprehensive measurement a difficult task. This paper evaluates alternative satellite-based deep learning approaches using detailed household census extracts from four African countries to accelerate progress toward comprehensive, fine-scale, and dynamic measurement of poverty at scale. The results indicate that transformer architectures solve multiple open measurement problems, by providing the most accurate measurement of local-level variation in household asset wealth across countries and cities, as well as changes in household asset wealth over time. Experiments that artificially restrict data availability show the model’s ability to achieve high performance with limited data. The proposed approach demonstrates the promise of combining satellite imagery, publicly available geo-features, and new deep learning architectures for hyperlocal and dynamic measurement of poverty in data-scarce environments.
  • Publication
    Safeguarding Marine Ecosystems and Society: The Role of Insurance in Protecting Nature and Supporting Sustainable Tourism
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-02-06) Cook, S.; Wilks, A. Rios; Wilson, P.
    This report aims to highlight opportunities for developing ecosystem-linked insurance - that is, insurance that integrates the effect of ecosystems in products covering coastal hazards. These products can provide funds for ecosystem restoration after a disaster occurs. This report points to several opportunities and ways forward for developing ecosystem insurance. Despite the challenges facing efforts to develop such insurance, advances are possible and could benefit both the insurance sector and Caribbean tourism industry.
  • Publication
    Kosovo: Education Digital Readiness Assessment 2024
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-02-05) Rajasekaran, S.; Jena, N.; Rillo, K.; Uka, A.; Wang, K.; Olszak-Olszewski, A.
    This report aims to identify barriers, needs, and potential opportunities for Kosovo to digitally transform its basic education system to strengthen efficiency and improve student performance in foundational skills (including digital skills). The rest of the report is structured as follows. Chapter 1 offers a brief introduction, and Chapter 2 delves in greater detail into the essential education context, including recent reforms, learning outcomes, and overall governance. Chapter 3 presents the country and sector vision for a digital strategy. Chapter 4 details the methodological approach for this study, which unfolds over the two following chapters. Chapter 5 presents the DISA (Digital Skills Analysis Deep Dive), and Chapter 6 presents the EDRA (Education Digital Readiness Assessment), followed by a synthesis of key recommendations and actions in Chapter 7 and complemented by a series of relevant annexes. The annexes include a detailed summary of recommendations (Annex A), a short background on the basic education system in the country (Annex B), the education strategy for 2022-2026 (Annex C), detailed EDRA methodology and framework (Annex D), and the stakeholder mapping (Annex D), as well as a glossary of key terms (Annex E). For technical audiences, reviewing the detailed methodology described in Annex D as a prerequisite to reviewing the EDRA analysis in Chapter 6 may be helpful.