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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Publication Peru Public Finance Review: Mobilizing Resources for Service Delivery and Growth(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-11-26) World BankPeru, once a high-growth economy achieving significant reductions in poverty, now faces stalling progress, citizen distrust and political instability. After robust growth averaging over 6 percent in the early 2000s and poverty reduction from 59 percent in 2004 to 24 percent in 2014, progress came to a halt around 2013 with weakening institutions and a pause in the commodity boom. More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic had a severe impact on Peru, which recorded the highest mortality rate globally. The pandemic intensified political instability, fueling public frustration in Peru, and delaying essential policy reforms. Today, over 90 percent of Peruvians distrust their government, a 25-percentage-point (pp) increase from 2011. Peru’s potential growth is around 2.5 percent, requiring 64 years to reach high-income country status. Nevertheless, Peru holds vast opportunities for faster development if it can seize key strategic opportunities and address long-overdue reforms, as emphasized in the Country Economic Memorandum (World Bank, 2025a).Publication Integrating NCD and Mental Health into Primary Health Care: How Digitally Enabled Team-based Care Improves Pathways to Care(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-12-11) World BankThis brief examines the potential for digital health to address some of these challenges to increase prevention knowledge and screening, connect individuals with the health system specifically at the PHC level, and facilitate person-centered care using a team-based approach. The World Bank’s Digital Transformation for Person-Centered NCD and Mental Health Care: A Practical Primer provides more information on how digital technologies can be harnessed across the health care cascade.Publication A Breath of Change: Solutions for Cleaner Air in the Indo-Gangetic Plains and Himalayan Foothills(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-12-05) Martin; Heger, Martin Philipp; Cros, Marion; Pople, AshleyAir pollution across the Indo-Gangetic Plains and Himalayan Foothills (IGP-HF) has reached critical levels, threatening health and productivity for nearly one billion people. The impacts are severe: cardiovascular and respiratory diseases have become leading causes of illness and death, average life expectancy in the IGP-HF region is shortened by more than three years, and around one million people die prematurely each year from exposure to polluted air. The associated economic damage is estimated at about 10 percent of regional gross domestic product (GDP) annually, driven by lost labor productivity, higher healthcare costs, and reduced human capital. This Solutions Book, A Breath of Change, sets out a practical roadmap for achieving the region’s shared, intermediate target of reducing annual average PM2.5 concentrations below 35 µg/m³ by 2035 (“35 by 35”), while laying the foundation for progressively cleaner air. Building on the diagnostics and country experiences synthesized in Striving for Clean Air, the solutions book moves from why clean air matters and what drives pollution to how to address air pollution. In other words, how coordinated, feasible, and evidence-based solutions can be implemented at scale. The IGP-HF airshed, an interconnected system spanning 13 jurisdictions across Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, and Pakistan, demands solutions that are both multi-sectoral and multi-jurisdictional. Chapter 1 explains why air quality matters in the IGP-HF. Chapter 2 presents sources of air pollution. The Solutions Book highlights a portfolio of interventions in each of the five key pollution emitting sectors: scaling up access to clean cooking fuels and appliances in chapter 3; electrifying and modernizing industrial boilers, furnaces, kilns and thermal power plants in chapter 4; accelerating the transition to electric and efficient vehicles alongside improvements in fuel quality, and strengthening of non-motorized transport in the transport sector in chapter 5; promoting sustainable agricultural crop residue, livestock manure and fertilizer management in chapter 6; and improving waste collection, segregation, and recycling in chapter 7. In parallel, protective sectors, particularly health in chapter 8 and education in chapter 9, play a vital role in helping people cope while air quality remains poor. ross-cutting themes are woven throughout the sectoral chapters, with deeper exploration of governance frameworks, market-based instruments and regional cooperation provided in chapters 10 to 12.Publication The Contribution of Human Capital to Current and Future Growth: An Extension of the World Bank’s Long-Term Growth Model (LTGM-HC)(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-12-10) Mendes, Arthur; Pennings, StevenThis paper presents the Long-Term Growth Model–Human Capital Extension (LTGM-HC), a spreadsheet-based toolkit that projects the human capital of the workforce from 2025 to 2100 for 153 countries. The LTGM-HC simulates pre-tertiary years of schooling, education quality, and health across age cohorts and how they affect current and future workforce productivity. The paper also produces three sets of general results. First, it provides new estimates of the current rate of human capital growth, which differ substantially from those in the Penn World Tables. Global average human capital growth is almost 1 percent and is surprisingly similar across income groups, as greater historical gains in years of schooling in poorer countries are offset by lower initial school quality. Second, it provides new estimates of the pace of future human capital growth. Without future reforms, average human capital growth will slow by around 0.15-0.2 percentage points per decade, hitting zero by 2080 when today’s children begin to retire. In contrast, a scenario with a typical pace of reform almost halves the rate of decline. Finally, it provides new estimates of the contribution of human capital to current and future economic growth. In a typical reform scenario, human capital growth is projected to raise annual GDP per capita growth by around half a percentage point over the next 75 years, leaving GDP per capita 45 percent higher by 2100. However, about two-thirds of these gains reflect reforms that have already been enacted. An extension to include tertiary education raises human capital growth, and its contribution to GDP growth, by around 0.1-0.2 percentage points.Publication Seeds of Change: The Effects of the Introduction of Bt Cotton in India(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-12-10) Gwee, Yi JieAlthough many studies have examined the factors affecting structural transformation, the role of relative factor endowments has not been extensively explored. This paper examines the effects of the introduction of Bt cotton in India and finds substantial increases in cotton output and the land allocated to growing it. The effects diminish as the ratio of labor-to-land increases. This suggests that when inputs are complementary and technological change is labor augmenting, the relative scarcity of other inputs can limit productivity gains, shaping patterns of structural transformation. Despite increases in cotton land and output, the share of workers in agriculture remained unchanged.