Other Public Sector Study
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Publication
The Welfare and Distributional Effects of Increasing Taxes on Tobacco in Vietnam
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06)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. -
Publication
Achieving Universal Access to ID: Gender-based Legal Barriers Against Women and Good Practice Reforms
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-01)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. -
Publication
Incentives for Improving Birth Registration Coverage: A Review of the Literature
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-12-31)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. -
Publication
The Distributional of Impacts of Cigarette Taxation in Bangladesh
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-06-01)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. -
Publication
Institutional Assessment of the Central Statistics Organization of Afghanistan
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-06-01)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. -
Publication
Mapping Indonesia’s Civil Service
(World Bank, Jakarta, 2018-05-21)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. -
Publication
The Kurdistan Region of Iraq: Reforming the Economy for Shared Prosperity and Protecting the Vulnerable
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-05-30)The Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) is a constitutionally recognized semiautonomous region in northern Iraq. Its government, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), based in Erbil, has the right, under the Iraqi constitution of 2005, to exercise legislative, executive, and judicial powers according to the constitution, except in what is listed therein as exclusive powers of the federal authorities. The Iraqi constitution defines the Kurdistan Region as a federal entity of Iraq. KRG has a parliamentary democracy with a regional assembly that consists of 111 seats. KRI has been largely immune to the insecurity and conflict witnessed elsewhere in Iraq, especially following the 2003 Iraq War. KRG is facing a wide range of immediate and medium to longer-term challenges that are intrinsically linked to the overall macroeconomic situation of Iraq as well as the regional and global environment. The immediate challenge consists in coping with (a) the deep fiscal crisis, and (b) the security and social problems brought about by the conflict with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) group and the resulting influx of Syrian refugees and Iraqi Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). These challenges are clearly immediate priorities for the KRG, and will bear significant repercussions nationally and internationally if inadequately addressed. The medium to longer-term challenges pertain to moderating dependence on the oil sector and transforming the KRI economy into a diversified one that supports private sector-led economic growth and job creation in a sustainable manner. -
Publication
Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia: Evaluation of MDGs Specific Purpose Grant to Regions
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-03-29)Ethiopia is a highly decentralized country. Presently, sub-national government taxes and revenues account for about 28 percent of general taxes and revenues, and sub-national expenditures amount to 51 percent of general government expenditures. The ensuing vertical mismatch is bridged by grants from the Federal government to the regions. Presently, these grants account for 57 percent of sub-national expenditures1. For many years, these grants consisted mostly of a block grant (the Federal General Purpose Grant) given without any strings attached, which means the regions could use it as they wished. The rest of the report is organized as follows. Section two provides the policy context that is the information, data, evolutions, etc. specific to Ethiopia, which are necessary to understand and interpret the MDGs grant policy. Section three present and discusses the policy content that is the components of the policy previously identified. Section four is a policy assessment, which utilizes the evaluation framework proposed above to analyze the relationships between the various components of the policy, and discuss its efficiency, its effectiveness and its success. Section five is a conclusion that summarizes the analysis, and attempts, prudently and modestly, to outline some potential avenues for future action. -
Publication
Decentralization and Subnational Service Delivery in Iraq: Status and Way Forward
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-03)Since the Constitution (2005) provided for decentralizing powers and functions for the Governorates, the government of Iraq has enacted several legal, policy, and institutional reform initiatives, the intent of which is to shift political and administrative powers and responsibilities from the Central Government to the Governorates. The legal and policy framework for decentralization is yet to be followed through with efficient implementation. The Government of Iraq and the World Bank will like to assess the current status of decentralization and its implications for improving service delivery at the Governorate level. The objective of the assessment is to take stock of the current state of decentralization in Iraq with a view to identifying factors that contribute to weak service delivery performance at the governorate level. The assessment will also make recommendations for policy and process reforms that are deemed necessary to moving forward the decentralization process, thereby helping to improve service delivery performance by the Governorates. The assessment was carried out through a combination of desk reviews and field level consultations. This assessment provides a snapshot of the current status of the decentralization process. It identifies policy and process reform measures that are necessary to strengthen service delivery by the 15 Governorates of Iraq. Strengthening local accountability should be the key to strengthening the service delivery performance of the Governorates. -
Publication
Integration of Civil Registration and Vital Statistics and Identity Management Systems: Botswana Success Story
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-09)The initiative of a case study on Botswana’s successful integration of civil and identification registers comes against a backdrop of major continental and global efforts to accelerate improvement in the area of civil registration. The national identification system (NIS) is linked with other government systems such as the elections system, the social benefits registration system (SOBERS), the government payroll, the transport system, and others to facilitate service delivery because a person’s identity serves as a gateway for accessing services. In addition, through this link the NIS is updated in real-time when a death occurs and the status of the registered citizen is automatically changed from live to deceased, and this update is imported to all other interfaced government systems in real-time. Civil registration is a credible source from which vital statistics in Botswana can be generated and was used previously to generate population reports. The creation of one department to provide civil and national registration headed by a single Registrar for both civil and national registration brought about benefits of synchronization of processes and immediate decision-making. Furthermore, having an institutional framework in place facilitates the smooth implementation of civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) and identity management (ID-M) through a network of offices strategically placed across the country to ensure that services are brought closer to the people.