Miscellaneous Knowledge Notes
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Publication
Exploring Two Years of Labor Market Policy Responses to COVID‑19: A Global Effort to Protect Workers and Jobs
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-01)To mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, countries have responded with an unprecedented number of social protection and jobs interventions. This brief is based on the COVID-19 social protection and jobs policy inventory and provides information on over 3,400 labor market policies in the inventory launched or announced between January 2020 and January 2022. -
Publication
High-Frequency Phone Survey (HFPS) - Phase 2: Sampling Design, Weighting, and Estimation
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-12)After implementing Phase 1 of the High-Frequency Phone Survey (HFPS) project in Latin America and The Caribbean (LAC) in 2020, the World Bank conducted Phase 2 in 2021 to continue to assess the socio-economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on households. This new phase, conducted in partnership with the UNDP LAC Chief Economist office, included two waves. Wave 1 covered 24 countries and Wave 2 covered 22 countries. Of these countries, 13 participated in Phase 1 and the rest joined in Phase 2. This document describes the sampling design, weighting and the right procedure to estimate indicators for the LAC HFPS Phase 2 surveys. -
Publication
The Road Not Taken?: Responding to the Energy Price Shock in East Asia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-11-17)Several countries in East Asia have increased fossil fuel subsidies to keep consumer prices lower than currently high international prices. These subsidies are discouraging the shift in consumption away from fossil fuels, while high prices are encouraging investment in new fossil fuel infrastructure. Providing income transfers instead of price subsidies would encourage consumption of cleaner alternatives, while softening the welfare loss. And subsidizing investment in renewables would avert the risk of being locked in to fossil fuels. The total cost need not be higher than that of fossil fuel subsidies. -
Publication
Myanmar Fiscal Monitoring: Myanmar Budget Brief
(Washington, DC, 2022-11)This budget brief presents a summary of developments in Myanmar’s public finances. This report includes two sections that cover the aggregate fiscal update and public finance developments in core service delivery ministries. The report relies on data obtained from published reports of the Ministry of Planning and Finance, and other publicly available information. Where news reports are referenced, additional efforts were made during the monitoring process to triangulate reports from several reputed news media sources to ensure the veracity of the information presented. -
Publication
LAC COVID-19 High-Frequency Phone Surveys: Phase II 2021 - Technical Note
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-11)Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) were among the regions most affected by the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in 2020 - despite being home to only 8.5 percent of the world’s population, over 47 million people were infected by the virus by the end of November 2021, representing almost 18 percent of global cases, and the socioeconomic and human capital effects will be felt for many years to come. While in 2021 the region experimented an important economic recovery, with mobility almost fully restored to pre-pandemic levels and a remarkable progress in vaccination campaigns, positive spillovers on households’ welfare have proved elusive in some countries and for some segments of the population. In an effort to continue monitoring how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the livelihoods of households in the region, the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) joined forces to implement a second phase of high-frequency phone surveys (HFPS) in over 20 LAC countries in 2021. A first wave (wave 1) was collected between May and July, with a second (wave 2) following between October and December 2021 to January 2022 for Peru. The HFPS phase II adds 11 countries to those originally included in phase one. In wave 2, a representative sample of minorities was obtained in seven countries. -
Publication
Disruption of Health Care Services and COVID-19 Vaccination in Latin America and the Caribbean by Mid-2021
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-11)Vaccination has constituted the most effective response to save lives and reactivate economies and societies. By October 19th, 2022, almost 1,300 million Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine doses had been administered in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). However, lingering gaps in achieving target vaccination levels throughout the region are especially concerning as new SARS-CoV-2 variants continue to emerge. At the regional level, Chile and Cuba were ahead with almost 91 and 89 percent of the population having completed their initial vaccination protocol, respectively. At the other end of the spectrum, Jamaica and Haiti lagged the rest of the region, with only 26 percent and 2 percent of their populations vaccinated, respectively. The 2021 high-frequency phone surveys (HFPS) provide insight into these issues by taking the pulse of household health care needs and barriers to access a year and a half into the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the information from the first wave of the 2021 HFPS, this note aims to present an overview of the disruption of health care services, the need for preventive and non-preventive health care services, and the status of COVID-19 vaccinations. -
Publication
Disaster Risk Financing: What it is and What it isn’t for Adaptive Social Protection In the Sahel - Debunking Myths About DRF in the Sahel
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-11)Adaptive safety nets are cash transfer programs that can rapidly increase beneficiary coverage, or the cash amounts they provide in response to disasters. Disaster risk financing (DRF) provides a set of tools and instruments that can efficiently help finance the costs of such responses. In the West Sahel, where chronic food insecurity and vulnerability are high and safety net coverage, data availability, and government fiscal space often remain limited, some of the common approaches to DRF meet their limitations. This note draws out some of these limitations and suggests ways for policymakers to address them. Among these, it suggests that governments in the Sahel focus on building reliable social protection delivery systems before turning to DRF; design DRF strategies that account for continued external assistance; focus first on more frequent, lower severity shocks rather than the extreme ones; and start their DRF engagements with sectoral DRF strategies rather than comprehensive national ones that try to address all disaster risks, costs, and sectors. -
Publication
Towards an Inclusive Recovery from COVID-19 Impacts: A Policy Brief
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-11)Coronavirus (COVID-19) partly reversed gains made in three decades of sustained decline in poverty and a decade of accelerated reduction in inequality in Philippines. Although the economy is recovering gradually, there are signs that the recovery may be uneven. Income recovery also seems to be slower for the poor. The COVID-19 pandemic may have long-term negative impacts on development of human capital. To manage the pandemic shock, a considerable number of poor households have relied on such adverse coping mechanisms as reducing food consumption, which may aggravate already prevalent child malnutrition and stunting. Policy needs to be directed to support an inclusive recovery and to address enduring medium to long term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. -
Publication
Targeting in Ultra-Poor Settings: Evidence from Six Countries in Rural Sahel
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-10-21)The main insights of this note are as follows: first, to significantly reduce poverty higher budgets for safety net interventions are needed, and expanding coverage is far more important than fine-tuning targeting methods. After geographical targeting, most PMT and CBT methods perform close to a random allocation of benefits when trying to identify food insecure households. While PMT consistently outperforms CBT in identifying households with the lowest consumption, differences are small when distances to the poverty line are considered. While non-beneficiaries experience significant indirect economic benefits from the program, there is mixed and limited evidence on social cohesion and fairness perceptions of targeting methods. Finally, costs are relatively minor as a share of total resources transferred. The policy note concludes with policy and research implications for contexts with high poverty rates, low inequality levels, and insufficient budgets. -
Publication
Vietnam Macro Monitoring, October 2022
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-10)This brief focuses on the economic development in Vietnam as of October 2022. Vietnam’s economy registered a strong growth of 13.7 percent (y/y) in Q3-2022 and 8.9 percent (y/y), mostly reflecting a low base effect. Industrial production and retail sales posted another month of high growth rates (13.0 percent (y/y) and 36.1 percent (y/y)), which could be attributed both to strong economic activities and to the low-base effects. Both exports and imports growth moderated in September 2022 due to weakening demand from major export markets. FDI commitment fell in September affected by the heighted uncertainty about the global economic prospects while FDI disbursement continued to improve. While the economic recovery has remained strong, heightened uncertainties related to the slowing global economy, rising domestic inflation, and tightening global financial conditions warrant increased vigilance and policy agility. Given the economy has not fully recovered and growth in main export markets is expected to slow, continued active fiscal policy to support the economy should be closely aligned with economic outcomes and coordinated with monetary policy. At the same time, as CPI and Core CPI are reaching 4 percent, the policy rate set by the authorities, monetary authorities should be ready to considerfurther tightening of monetary policy to ensure inflation remains anchored. Given the end of forbearance and tightening financial conditions, the financial sector faces heightened risks and prompt SBV guidance would help stem materialization of such risks at the sector level, potentially affecting the real economy. The recent turmoil around the Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) case highlights the need for increased transparency through timely publication of detailed information about the banking sector performance, an enhanced corporate governance, a strengthened risk-based supervision, including supervision of business groups and related party lending and early intervention, and an enhanced bank resolution framework.