Other Public Sector Study

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    Toward More People-Centered Service Delivery: Opportunities for the National ID System in Lesotho
    (Washington, DC, 2022-05) World Bank
    This note documents the current and emerging use cases for the national ID (NID) system in the Kingdom of Lesotho. It demonstrates considerable potential and progress to date, and makes recommendations for moving toward a more inclusive, trusted and service delivery-oriented NID system. Global experience has shown that national ID systems can promote more efficient, transparent and people-centered service delivery in the public and private sectors, particularly when the system is designed with the appropriate enablers and safeguards in place to support improved development outcomes and mitigate risks. As countries move toward digital economies and governance, ID systems often serve as an essential digital platform, underpinning the digital payment infrastructure and transactions, as well as the provision of online and offline government services.
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    Archipelagic Economies: Spatial Economic Development in the Pacific
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-07-12) Utz, Robert J. ; Utz, Robert J.
    This study explores the far-reaching economic consequences emerging from the archipelagic nature of most Pacific Island countries (PICs). The dispersion of populations across thousands of miles of ocean and hundreds of islands magnifies the economic disadvantages arising from the remoteness and small size that characterize the PICs as a whole. At the same time, population dispersion creates extraordinary challenges related to public service delivery, connectivity, migration and urbanization, and the equity and inclusiveness of economic development. This study focuses on these challenges in pursuit of two main objectives: deepening the understanding of socio-economic conditions on the PICs’ outer islands and the drivers of migration from outer islands to main islands; and reviewing the policy and investment options for fostering the socio-economic development of outer islands populations. This overview summarizes the main findings in five parts. First, the authors present the objectives and outline of the full report. This is followed by a section which explains how the PICs’ external and internal geography are key determinants of socio-economic development outcomes and spatial inequalities. The third part presents data on spatial inequality with respect to a range of socio-economic indicators, public services, connectivity, and migration. In the fourth part, the authors discuss interactions between geographic dispersion and key political economy issues that shape spatial economic policy decisions and outcomes. The report concludes with a summary of policy options for dealing with the development challenges arising from geographic dispersion.
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    Barriers to the Inclusion of Women and Marginalized Groups in Nigeria’s ID System: Findings and Solutions from an In-Depth Qualitative Study
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021) Hanmer, Lucia ; Esquivel-Korsiak, Victoria ; Pande, Rohini
    An estimated one billion people around the world do not have an officially recognized means of identification (ID). The majority live in low-income countries (LICs), particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. This study contributes to an overarching goal of building global knowledge about increasing women’s and marginalized groups’ access to and use of IDs to promote development. There is little systematic evidence about the causes of gender gaps or the exclusion of particular groups from possession of government-recognized IDs. The study aims to analyze gaps in access to the national ID issued by Nigeria’s National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), and provide evidence-based advice to policy makers on how to lift the constraints that create high barriers for women and marginalized groups.
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    Citizen Engagement in Operations: A Stock-Take of Citizen Engagement in Development Policy Financing
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06) Kumagai, Saki
    Guided by the 2014 Strategic Framework for Mainstreaming Citizen Engagement in World Bank Group Operations, the World Bank supports policies, programs, projects, and advisory services and analytics where citizen engagement (CE) can improve development results. While the corporate commitment to mainstream CE targets investment operations, the World Bank teams continue to explore CE in other instruments. Engaging Citizens for Better Development Results, a report by the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG), assessed the Bank Group’s efforts to mainstream CE. It recommends the World Bank “encourage and support efforts of its regional, country, and Global Practices teams to establish, where appropriate, thick CE that is regular and continuous, uses multiple tools, and is embedded in country systems.” It also suggests this objective could be achieved by more systematically using existing channels of dialogue and stakeholder engagement, including that of Development Policy Financing (DPF), and applying tools at the various levels. Given this context, this Governance Note aims to take stock of existing CE practice in DPF by shedding light on the prior action usage.
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    The Welfare and Distributional Effects of Increasing Taxes on Tobacco in Vietnam
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06) Fuchs Tarlovsky, Alan ; Gonzalez Icaza, Fernanda
    This paper assesses the welfare and distributional effects of raising taxes on tobaccoin Vietnam. Tobacco taxes are recognized as effective policy tools to reduce tobaccoconsumption and to improve health outcomes. However, policy makers often hesitateto use them because of claims of their potentially regressive effects. According to thoseclaims, poorer households are particularly hurt by tobacco tax policies, as cigarettepurchases represent a larger share of their budgets relative to higher-income smokers.The paper argues that the claims on the regressive effects of tobacco tax policies arebased on naive, shortsighted, and incorrect estimations. Tobacco-related illnessesdamage health outcomes and the quality of the lives of smokers and their families, whilethey also cost billions of dollars in medical expenditures and losses in human capital andproductivity every year. Tobacco consumption imposes heavy economic burdens onhouseholds and governments, in addition to its well-known negative health and socialimpacts. Raising taxes on cigarettes dissuades consumption, hence improving healthoutcomes, adverting premature deaths, and reducing direct and indirect economic costs.The analysis applies the Extended Cost Benefit Analysis (ECBA) methodology to simulateempirically the costs, as well as the benefits of increasing the prices on cigarettes onthe welfare of Vietnamese households. Following a well-established body of literature,the ECBA acknowledges that there may be short-term direct negative effects of raisingprices on tobacco, as smokers can struggle to continue to purchase tobacco with theirunchanged household budgets. However, the model also incorporates two of the mainbenefits of reducing tobacco consumption by increasing taxes: (a) the reduction insmoking-related medical expenses borne by households and (b) the additional incomesthat households can earn by preventing years of productive life lost due to smoking attributablepremature deaths. A critical contribution of the ECBA is to incorporate decile-specific price elasticities of demand for cigarettes, to quantify the behavioral responses or sensitivity of smokers in different income groups to changes in cigarette prices. To the knowledge of the authors, this is the first available empirical exercise to estimate price elasticities by income decile in Vietnam. Consistent with the literature and with empirical findings in other countries, the price elasticities of demand for cigarettes are larger for lower-income households. Lower income smokers are likely to reduce their tobacco consumption more drastically, when faced with a price increase. The ultimate distributional effect on welfare of the increasein the price of cigarettes due to tax increases will then depend on assessing the potentialbenefits against the short-term costs.
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    Achieving Universal Access to ID: Gender-based Legal Barriers Against Women and Good Practice Reforms
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-01) Hanmer, Lucia ; Elefante, Marina
    Proof of identity is vital in modern society. Individuals need identity documents to participate in many aspects of civil, political, and economic life. These include obtaining a job in the formal sector, opening a bank account, borrowing from a financial institution, and owning a property or a business in addition to traveling, voting, and gaining access to health and social welfare services. For women and girls, legal identity is a stepping stone to empowerment, agency, and freedom of movement. Hence, it is a vital enabler of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG). Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. However, many women and girls do not have access to legal identity. Globally, it is estimated that 1 billion people are unable to prove their identity, and millions more have forms of identification that cannot be reliably verified or authenticated (World Bank 2015). This paper explores how gender-based legal differences and nationality laws limit women’s ability to obtain identification for themselves, their children, and, in the case of nationality laws, their spouses too. It brings together data and analysis produced by agencies working on legal barriers that pertain to their mandates, for example, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on birth registration, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on statelessness, and the evidence produced by the World Bank Group’s Women, Business and the Law and other legal sources. Its aim is to provide a comprehensive overview of the extent of gender-based legal barriers against women to ID and what is known about their impact on women, children, and excluded groups.
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    Incentives for Improving Birth Registration Coverage: A Review of the Literature
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-12-31) World Bank
    This paper describes a framework of supply and demand factors that could affect birth registration coverage rates, particularly in the context of social transfers. Within this framework, a review of the empirical literature (academic and grey) was conducted on incentives that have been demonstrated to increase birth registration coverage. More than two hundred articles were reviewed, and forty-two (twenty-three academic and nineteen grey) were selected for this study based on relevance. The literature encompassed evidence from Asia, Africa, and Latin America on linking birth registration with social transfer programs, such as cash transfers, which have resulted in increased birth registration rates. The methods in the literature on incentives for countries to increase birth registration coverage vary. There is a lack of scholarly research on incentives to address both supply and demand barriers for birth registration and a need for more robust literature on the topic.
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    The Distributional of Impacts of Cigarette Taxation in Bangladesh
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-06-01) Del Carmen, Giselle ; Fuchs, Alan ; Genoni, Maria Eugenia
    Despite the obvious positive health impacts of tobacco taxation, an argument raised against it is that poor households bear the burden of the increased prices because of their higher share of spending on tobacco. This report includes estimates of the distributional impacts of price rises on cigarettes under various scenarios using the Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES) 2016/17. One contribution of this analysis is to quantify the impacts by allowing price elasticities to vary across consumption deciles. This shows that an increase in the price of cigarettes in Bangladesh has small consumption impacts and does not significantly change the poverty rate or consumption inequality. These findings stem from relatively even cigarette consumption patterns between less and more welloff households. These results hold even if one considers some small substitution through the use of bidis, which are largely consumed by the poor. The short-term consumption impacts are also negligible compared with the estimated gains because of savings in medical costs and the greater number of productive years of life.
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    Institutional Assessment of the Central Statistics Organization of Afghanistan
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-06-01) World Bank Group
    Afghanistan has achieved substantial development progress since 2001, but faces important upcoming challenges. Government efforts supported by aid inflows have fueled rapid economic growth, expanded the quality of and access to basic social services, and improved the capacity of public sector institutions. However, deterioration in the security situation following the security transition in 2014 combined with declining international assistance pose formidable challenges for Afghanistan to manage its economy and deliver public services. The availability of high quality, reliable economic, socio-economic, and demographic statistics is vital if appropriate policy responses to these challenges are to be identified and implemented.
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    Mapping Indonesia’s Civil Service
    (World Bank, Jakarta, 2018-05-21) World Bank
    Indonesia’s civil service has expanded by 25 percent in the last 12 years, which presents opportunities for the government of Indonesia (GoI) to work toward the goal of reducing poverty and enhancing social welfare. Yet civil servants must be skilled, knowledgeable, and effective at their jobs to maximize their contribution to society and the economy. This report examines an original data set constructed from GoI data on all the country’s active civil servants to examine personal characteristics including age, gender, education level (which proxies for skill), and promotions. It addresses two important questions: 1. Are highly skilled and knowledgeable workers currently being attracted, recruited, and promoted?; 2. Are civil servants from historically underrepresented groups, including women, being given equal opportunities for advancement and promotion? The study recommends government action in three policy areas: 1. Increase promotion opportunities for women and increase their overall representation in senior positions; 2. Distribute skilled civil servants more evenly throughout the country by improving the incentives for highly skilled service providers to rotate into poor and remote regions; 3. Plan for the upcoming wave of retirements within the civil service by recruiting more women from top universities and hiring medical and teaching staff only from licensed and accredited institutions.