Other Public Sector Study

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Lessons from Disaster Governance: Port of Beirut Explosion Reform Recovery and Reconstruction Framework
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-07-05) GFDRR; World Bank
Lebanon’s experience of compounding crises over the past several years points to the nexus of fragility and disaster. The country has recently experienced one of the worst financial and economic crises in human history. The crisis derives from a set of structural causes of fragility: a combination of chronic macroeconomic imbalances and political inaction stemming from political polarization and decision-making paralysis. Lebanon’s economic model has failed to generate economic opportunities, leading to high levels of inequality and poverty. The privatization of services and their patronage-based access, coupled with the capture and mismanagement of public funds intended for infrastructure, have led to a decline in the quality of virtually all public services, including a near collapse in electricity provision. The international community’s response after this humanitarian disaster was an innovative institutional platform, the Reform, Recovery and Reconstruction Framework (3RF), aiming to facilitate recovery and reconstruction in the aftermath of the disaster while reactivating reforms to address the drivers of fragility in the country. Organized by the European Union (EU), the United Nations (UN), and the World Bank in December 2020, the 3RF not only provided a prioritized comprehensive plan across various sectors to support Beirut’s recovery and reconstruction but also included a second track to advance critical reforms to address governance challenges in Lebanon. The 3RF is a unique governance platform, backed by a fund-pooling facility (the Lebanon Financing Facility, or LFF), which links the unlocking of investments in Lebanon with the reform results so that nonhumanitarian assistance received through national institutions is conditional on the implementation of reform. While the people-centered recovery response concluded in June 2022, the 3RF continues on Track 2, which focuses on inclusive policy dialogue, the implementation of reforms, and the reconstruction of critical services and infrastructure.
Slovakia - Understanding the Productivity of Slovakia’s Local Governments: Key findings from an empirical study
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-05-07) World Bank
This report employs a diverse range of data sources to examine district-level variations in public sector productivity in Slovakia. It leverages administrative data to measure productivity from the Fabasoft and Cezir data systems that provide detailed insights into case management and business licensing processes. Employment data, sourced from the government's job portal, sheds light on competition for public sector jobs. Additionally, a survey of district office public officials captures their management practices and attitudes. By incorporating these varied data sources, the report offers a comprehensive understanding of productivity factors and management dynamics within district offices, enabling a complex and informed assessment of the determinants of public sector productivity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Kurdistan Region of Iraq: Reforming the Economy for Shared Prosperity and Protecting the Vulnerable
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-05-30) World Bank Group
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.
Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia: Evaluation of MDGs Specific Purpose Grant to Regions
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-03-29) World Bank
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.
Decentralization and Subnational Service Delivery in Iraq: Status and Way Forward
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-03) World Bank
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.