Country Economic Memorandum

254 items available

Permanent URI for this collection

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

Items in this collection

Now showing 1 - 10 of 22

Rwanda Country Economic Memorandum: Pathways to Sustainable and Inclusive Growth in Rwanda
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-11-13) World Bank
The report outlines an agenda to strengthen information and communication technology (ICT) services in Rwanda, where network coverage has improved but broadband uptake remains low. Rwanda needs to boost digital service use among consumers and the private sector by increasing access to affordable smart devices, expanding digital skills initiatives, and improving broadband quality and affordability through network upgrades, densification, and stricter competition enforcement. Key regulatory measures include a reference interconnection over (RIO), better spectrum management for next-gen technologies like 5G, and infrastructure sharing to lower service costs. While recent laws on personal data protection and cybersecurity have created a solid regulatory foundation, their implementation is still in progress. To achieve global standards, Rwanda must enhance regulations related to nonpersonal data portability and net neutrality, as current rules restrict cross-border data flows vital for digital market integration and e-commerce. This effort should be supported by regional and global collaboration on regulatory harmonization. Further public investment is needed to develop foundational digital public infrastructure, such as identification, trusted data sharing, and digital payments systems, to scale digital services safely and affordably. Additionally, improvements in the enabling framework and skills development are crucial for wider adoption of technologies like artificial intelligence (AI).
Malawi Country Economic Memorandum: A Narrow Path to Prosperity
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-01-08) World Bank
This Country Economic Memorandum (CEM) argues for a significant shift in policy to enable a virtuous cycle of sustained and inclusive economic growth, outlined infive building blocks. Chapter 1 identifies policy priorities to restore the macroeconomic fundamentals for growth through fiscal reform, debt sustainability, external rebalancing, and monetary stability. The following three chapters address three core structural constraints to growth and propose key reforms to accelerate agricultural commercialization and improve rural labor markets (Chapter 2), enable the private sector to drive productivity growth (Chapter 3), and catalyze exports and foreign investment (Chapter 4). Acknowledging that implementing key growth-enhancing policies—be they macroeconomic or structural—are the result of complex political economy and governance arrangements, Chapter 5 focuses on how past Malawian successes can inform future sectoral policies, reforms, and strategies to achieve the goals outlined in the Malawi 2063.
Yemen Country Economic Memorandum 2022: Glimmers of Hope in Dark Times
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-06-22) World Bank
Yemen’s economy has been transformed by eight years of violent conflict. War has shattered the country’s already fragile economic equilibrium, touching upon virtually every aspect of life. The compounded shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic and rising global prices have only deepened the economic and humanitarian disaster precipitated by the war. Since the start of the conflict, economic analyses have tended to focus on the deterioration of macroeconomic indicators, the sharp rise in poverty and food insecurity, and the destruction of infrastructure and the capital stock, but relatively little attention has been paid to the current structure of the economy or what prospects can be envisaged for the country. Also, it is important to situate this analysis within the political economy dynamics of the country which majorly affect the economic development challenges of the country. Data constraints and the unique characteristics of Yemen’s recent experience limit the effectiveness of traditional growth-analysis methodologies. This Country Economic Memorandum (CEM) uses novel data-collection methods and analytical techniques, triangulating its findings with traditional approaches and direct data collection to close the economic knowledge gap. Information sources include extensive key-informant interviews, household phone surveys, and remotely sensed geospatial data based on satellite imagery, including nighttime illumination data. This CEM also combines an in-depth political economy analysis with economic development investigation.
Pathways to Sustainable Growth in Niger: A World Bank Group Country Economic Memorandum
(Washington, DC, 2022) World Bank
This country economic memorandum aims to support Niger’s efforts to walk on a path conducive to a resilient and sustainable economic growth. It does so by attempting to answer the following five questions, each of which constitutes a separate chapter: (i) what were the salient structural characteristics of Niger’s growth performance in the last 20 years; (ii) what are the margins to accelerate growth in the medium to long term; (iii) how can technology be a vehicle for private sector development; (iv) how can the country’s large natural resource endowments be managed in a transparent way that benefits the whole population; and (v) how can the current disaster management framework be strengthened to increase resilience to natural shocks
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.
Lake Chad Regional Economic Memorandum: Technical Paper 3. Estimating the Spillover Economic Effects of Foreign Conflict - Evidence from Boko Haram
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-11-12) Jedwab, Remi; Blankespoor, Brian; Masaki, Takaaki; Rodríguez-Castelán, Carlos
Violent conflicts present a formidable threat to regional economies. Throughout the world, border regions in many countries are possibly impacted by the cross-border economic effects of regional insurgencies in neighboring countries or national state failures, i.e. "bad neighbors". This raises two questions. First, what is the magnitude of the spill-over economic effects of foreign conflict and what are the channels through which they operate Second, what policies can governments adopt in the potentially exposed regions to mitigate such spill-over effects. In this paper, we adopt a difference-in-difference (DiD) framework leveraging the unexpected rise of the Boko Haram insurgency in Northeastern Nigeria in 2009 to study its economic effects in neighboring areas in Cameroon, Chad and Niger that were not directly targeted by Boko Haram activities. We find strong cross-border economic effects that are likely driven by reduced trade activities, not the diffusion of conflict. Factors of local economic resilience to this foreign conflict shock then include trade diversification and political and economic securitization. More generally, conflicts, if they have regional economic effects, may necessitate regional responses.
Ghana Rising: Accelerating Economic Transformation and Creating Jobs
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-11-10) World Bank
Ghana has been a rising growth star and a beacon of hope in West Africa. Strong economic growth over the past two decades led to a near doubling of GDP per capita, lifting the country through the threshold for middle-income status in 2011. GDP per capita grew by an average of 3 percent per year over the past two decades, putting Ghana in the top ten fastest growing countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). A rising tide has tended to lift all boats. Poverty rates more than halved between 1998 and 2016, and the extreme poverty rate declined from 36.0 percent in 1991 to 8.2 percent in 2016. The net primary school enrollment rate rose from 62.5 percent in 2000 to 86.0 percent in 2019. This progress has motivated the government’s goal to lift the country to high-income status by 2057. The focus of this Country Economic Memorandum (CEM) is to review options for Ghana to create enough higher quality jobs through economic transformation. Economic transformation, or inclusive productivity growth, occurs as people and resources shift from lower to higher productivity activities. It raises household incomes and living standards, thereby lifting people out of poverty. It can be achieved through the movement of workers and other resources between firms and sectors, or through workers staying within existing firms that benefit from within-firm productivity growth by adopting better technologies and capabilities.
Lake Chad Regional Economic Memorandum: Technical Paper 1. Socioeconomic Trends in the Lake Chad Region
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-11-09) Masaki, Takaaki; Rodríguez-Castelán, Carlos
The Lake Chad region, which is an economically-and socially integrated area spanning across four countries of Chad, Cameroon, Niger, and Nigeria in north-west Africa, has been trapped in a vicious circle of suboptimal territorial development and fragility. This note shows that the Lake Chad region lags in multiple dimensions of development ranging from poverty, human capital, and access to services. A poverty rate in the Lake Chad region is found to be much higher than other parts of the countries surrounding the lake. The regional poverty rate in the Extreme North region of Cameroon (59 percent) is three times higher that of the rest of the country (19 percent). In Nigeria, the Lake Chad region203 has a poverty rate (72 percent) nearly twice as high as in the rest of the country (38 percent). Chad is the only exception, where the poverty rate in the country’s Lake Chad region (31 percent) is lower than the rest of the country (40 percent).204 This is explained by the fact that the Chad region around the lake lies near the capital of the country, with a consequently higher urbanization rate and a relatively high population density. The note is organized as follows. Section 2.2 provides key statistics on poverty, sector of work, and human capital indicators in the Lake Chad region vis-à-vis other parts of the country and examine how the Lake Chad lags behind in different dimensions. Section 2.3 provides a diagnostic of economic geography with a focus on three dimensions of density, distance and division. Section 2.4 identifies a set of structural factors, aggregate shocks and selected policies that might be associated with the dynamics of economic activity and social inclusion across the region.
Aiming High: Navigating the Next Stage of Malaysia’s Development
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-02-02) World Bank
Malaysia is likely to make the transition from an upper-middle-income economy to a high-income economy within the next five years, despite thesetback of the COVID-19-induced recession in 2020. This transition represents an important milestone in Malaysia’s development, having transformed living standards in less than a generation, slashing the extreme poverty rate to less than one percent of the population, and ending the country’s long tenure in the “middle-income trap”. However, Malaysia has been severely affected by COVID-19 and it will take several years beforethe scars of the pandemic are fully erased. The country experienced a “triple shock”: the direct health impact of the virus; the economic impact of movement restrictions; and the growth impact of a global recession. With Malaysia on the verge of achieving this transition, it is an opportune time to address a number of questions regarding the speed of Malaysia’s growth, its quality, and its sustainability. Malaysia is growing slower thanmany countries that achieved high-income status in recent decades. In addition, compared to many other countries that have graduated from middle-income status, it has a lower share of employment at high skill levels and higher levels of inequality. And, compared to countries in the OECD, Malaysia collects less in taxes, spends less on social protection, and performs relatively poorly in terms of measures related to environmentalmanagement and the control of corruption. Many of these fault lines have become exposed during the pandemic. Most significantly, there is a growing sense that despite economic growth, the aspirations of Malaysia’s middle-class are not being met and that the economy hasn’t produced enough well-paying, high-quality jobs. There is a widespread sense that the proceeds of growth have not been equitably shared and that increases in the cost-of-living are outstripping incomes, especially in urban areas, where three-fourths of Malaysians reside. Policies and institutions that have worked in the past may no longer be appropriate for the next stage of Malaysia’s development, with a different set of policies and institutions required at higher levels of income and development. The policies that enabled Malaysia to successfully make the transition from low- to middle-income need to be adapted to meet the challenges it will face in the future. At an earlier stage of its development, factor accumulation was a key driver of Malaysia’s growth. As it makes the transition, it will increasingly need to depend upon more knowledge-intensive and productivity-driven growth, closer to the technological frontier and with a greater emphasis on achieving inclusive and sustainable development. As Malaysia positions itself for the next phase of its development and beyond the pandemic, many of the issues related to this transformation are being addressed and discussed, including through the 12th Malaysia Plan and the Shared Prosperity Vision 2030. With the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and its potential to depress growth into the future, issues related to Malaysia’s readiness for the future have become even more significant. The analysis in this report suggests that for Malaysia to fulfil its potential, to transition successfully to high-income and developed country status, and to sustain equitable growth beyond that point, reforms are needed in six broad and inter-linked areas: (i) revitalizing long-term growth; (ii) boosting competitiveness; (iii) creating jobs; (iv) modernizing institutions; (v) promoting inclusion; and (vi) financing shared prosperity.
Escaping the Low-Growth Trap: Guinea-Bissau Country Economic Memorandum
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-11-02) World Bank
Guinea-Bissau’s massive economic potential has not so far translated into better livelihoods for its population. Growth per capita has averaged less than 1 percent per year over 2000-2019. This chapter provides an in-depth analysis of the factors behind the economic stagnation. An interplay of three constraints have impeded sustained high growth. First, the low and volatile growth performance is linked to fragility and political instability, which, together with a poorly diversified economy, with raw cashew nuts accounting for 95-98 percent of export earnings, help explain the stop-go growth cycle. Second, human capital accumulation remains low. An acute shortage of a skilled workforce is a major constraint to inclusive growth. The education system is marked by alarmingly low levels of learning. Third, private investment is particularly low—the second lowest in Africa. Years of underinvestment in infrastructure, energy, and human capital are holding the country back from achieving strong, enduring and inclusive growth. The chapter concludes by highlighting how the COVID-19 crisis exacerbates these constraints and discusses areas that could support sustainable growth. The chapter is organized as follows: section 1.1 presents a brief overview of the political and social context. Section 1.2 puts recent growth into historical and comparative perspective. Section 1.3 presents analysis that helps explain the low-growth trap and identifies possible areas that Guinea-Bissau could pursue to escape this trap. Finally, Section 1.4 discusses the economic impact of COVID-19 and potential pathways to recovery.