Country Economic Memorandum

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http://hdl.handle.net/10986/2184

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Tajikistan Country Gender Assessment

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-11-30) World Bank

Tajikistan has a lot to show in terms of creating an enabling policy framework for gender equity, yet large gendered challenges remain. The global COVID-19 outbreak is impacting economies around the world, including Tajikistan, in an unprecedented manner and aggravates existing gender challenges. This report is presenting achievements made and challenges still to be addressed in view of gender-equity in Tajikistan, based on a desk study covering using most recent material from Tajikistan national sources, the World Bank, development partners and others. It is oriented towards key strategic objectives of the World Bank Group (WBG) Gender Strategy for the period of FY17-FY23 with relevance for the Tajikistan context.
Kyrgyz Republic Country Economic Memorandum

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03-26) Izvorski, Ivailo ; Mbowe, Appolenia ; Dubashov, Bakyt ; Gassner, Katharina ; Ferrantino, Michael J. ; Islam, Roumeen ; Sahovic, Tarik ; Izvorski, Ivailo

The Kyrgyz Republic has experienced modest and volatile economic expansion since the economy bottomed out from the transition recession in 1995, when GDP amounted to about half of its pre-independence levels. As a result of structural reforms at the start of transition, the emergence of remittances and commodity exports, largely gold, as powerful new drivers of growth, and improvements in the macroeconomic management in the recent decade, per-capita real GDP grew by 3.1 percent a year on average since 1995. The Kyrgyz Republic is now a lower middle-income economy, as it was in 1990. Economic expansion has benefitted from fixed investment that has risen to 31 percent of GDP, one of the highest in Europe and Central Asia and well-above the threshold of 25 percent reached by the group of successful countries studied by the Growth Commission in 2007. Lower fiscal deficits and low inflation indicate the success of recent macroeconomic policies. These achievements notwithstanding, Kyrgyz Republic’s growth and productivity performance has lagged most relevant comparators, frustrating the needs of the poor and the young. As a result, while per-capita GDP in constant prices has doubled since 1995, it has still not caught up with pre-independence levels. Per-capita incomes in the Kyrgyz Republic have increased by 20 percent less than the average of lower middle-income countries since 2000 and 40 percent less than the average for the Caucasus and Central Asia. Productivity increases – proxied by changes in total factor productivity, have averaged half a percent since 2000, leaving largely factor accumulation as the driver of economic growth. And while ‘Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything’, highlighting one of the main challenges of the country’s current growth model.3 Poverty has declined, but modest growth has made a modest dent, leaving the poverty rate as high as 31 percent, with a substantial part of the population living in regions with more limited and lower quality government services than in Bishkek.
Tajikistan Country Economic Memorandum: Nurturing Tajikistan’s Growth Potential

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-05) World Bank Group

This Country Economic Memorandum (CEM) analyzes a set of the critical constraints to domestic private sector-led and outward-oriented growth in Tajikistan, by examining the structural bottlenecks to private sector investment and exports. The report is selective in looking at key public policies needed to improve Tajikistan’s macroeconomic resilience and foster private sector development to ensure sustainable growth. This CEM should be seen as the first of a series of programmatic work intended to provide advisory support to the Tajik authorities over the medium-term as they update the National Development Strategy. The report focuses on two important areas of public policy: first, the role of the tax system in encouraging investment and entrepreneurship, examines the principal deficiencies in the tax regime and in its administration, and proposes reforms to improve the incentives for investment. Second, in view of the dominance of the state and of state-owned enterprises in the economy and regulatory gaps to ensure level playing field, the report analyzes the competition policy framework, with the aim of identifying policy reforms that will encourage firm entry and create a competitive market in goods and services. The two interrelated objectives – macroeconomic incentives for investment and savings and the domestic competition and tax regime - reinforce each other. The choice of the above thematic areas is guided by the team’s preliminary discussions with various stakeholders within the government and outside the government. The CEM builds on the World Bank’s previous reports on Tajikistan, namely on the Jobs Diagnostics and Systematic Country Diagnostics. The Jobs Diagnostics proposes the government to consider a jobs strategy based on the following three pillars: i) facilitate the creation of more jobs, particularly in the formal private sector; ii) improve the quality of existing jobs, especially in the informal sector; and iii) facilitate better access to jobs including transitions from inactivity to employment and from low to higher quality jobs, with a focus on vulnerable workers. The focus of the CEM is well aligned also with the new Country Partnership Framework (CPF) for 2019-23 currently in making. This report will be followed by analytical and policy work on other critical constraints to private sector-led growth: the establishment of a rules-based policy setting and creating market-supporting institutions that promote greater economic formalization; building upon areas of high potential for transformative change such as the financial strengths of the energy sector and macro-fiscal implications of investments to Rogun HPP; gains from deeper international integration and infrastructure access provided by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI); and investing in human capital. This chapter of the CEM analyses the main causes of macro-fiscal vulnerabilities and suggests policy recommendations to improve resilience of the Tajik economy.
Kazakhstan Reversing Productivity Stagnation: Country Economic Memorandum

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019) World Bank

After experiencing exceptional economic growth in the 2000s, Kazakhstan’s economy has slowed sharply since the global financial crisis, putting development achievements at risk. The economic slowdown has been caused by sharply lower commodity prices, and structural degradation of the economy. Kazakhstan’s productivity growth has steadily fallen over the past two decades. Falling within-sector productivity improvements are the driving force behind Kazakhstan’s productivity slowdown. The private sector is significantly constrained and does not exhibit many important features of healthy private sectors worldwide. Empirical evidence suggests that business entry rates are relatively low in Kazakhstan, even controlling for the structure of economy. The evidence shows that new (and small) firms are more productive than older (and larger) firms. The corrosive patterns must be corrected to revive productivity, which is essential for higher economic growth - since higher investment cannot substitute for productivity growth in the long run. The first policy imperative is to level the playing field for all firms - well-connected or otherwise. The second policy is to strengthen the rule of law and to deal more aggressively and comprehensively with corruption. Third, the governments will need to introduce structural changes in the economy to boost private investment and reduce a disproportionately large role of the state in the economy.
Lessons from Poland, Insights for Poland: A Sustainable and Inclusive Transition to High Income Status

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017) World Bank Group

This report discusses Poland’s experience along five dimensions. These five dimensions - a pentagon of policies and institutions are governing, sustaining, connecting, growing, and including. The main lessons from Poland and the key insights for its future, based on this pentagon, are presented in the lessons and insights summarized in this report. Poland’s experience underlines the importance of a shared vision to sustain continuing reforms. Poland’s rapid economic ascent created new challenges: the creative destruction on which the growth process was based, successfully, caused massive social change. The report addresses two sets of questions. First, what are the lessons from Poland’s remarkable transition to high income?; what policies were behind Poland’s economic achievements?; why was Poland able to achieve high-income per capita so fast, while many other countries remained in the upper-middle-income range for decades - trapped middle-income countries (MICs)?; what policies were similar to those pursued by other new high income countries (HICs) and what were specific to Poland?, and second, what are the insights for Poland going forward? Given international experience and Poland’s characteristics, what policies can it adopt to continue its ascent and reach the much higher incomes of countries that have been high income for a considerable period - the established HICs?