Other Public Sector Study

335 items available

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https://hdl.handle.net/10986/2206

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Global Trends in AI Governance: Evolving Country Approaches
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-05) World Bank Group
As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly integral to global economies and societies, the need for effective AI governance has never been more urgent. The rapid advancement in AI technologies and their widespread adoption across many sectors, such as healthcare, finance, agriculture, and public administration, presents unprecedented opportunities and significant risks. Ensuring that AI is developed and deployed in a manner that is ethical, transparent, and accountable requires robust governance frameworks that can keep pace with technological evolution. This report explores the emerging landscape of AI governance, providing policymakers with an overview of key considerations, challenges, and global approaches to regulating and governing AI. It examines the foundational elements necessary for thriving local AI ecosystems, such as reliable digital infrastructure, a stable and sufficient power supply, supportive policies for digital development, and investment in local talent. As countries navigate this complex landscape, the report highlights the need to encourage innovation by mitigating risks like bias, privacy violations, and lack of transparency, emphasizing the importance of sustainable growth and responsible AI governance.
ID4D Diagnostic of ID Systems in Angola
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-07-15) World Bank
In Angola, identification is a critical tool for accessing public services and facilitating inclusion and participation in local economic development. Birth registration is mandatory to obtain a National Identity (ID) card, which is a prerequisite for accessing numerous public services, including education, municipal administrative services, paying municipal fees, registering properties and vehicles, applying for a job, opening a bank account, or requesting a loan, among others. Since 2002, the Government of Angola has made great strides toward modernizing and expanding access to civil registration and identification through registration campaigns, adopting a modern ID card, and efforts to simplify procedures and digitize services. Nevertheless, significant barriers remain to improving identification coverage and accessibility. As a result, birth registration and identification are far from universal, with substantial disparities along age, rural-urban, gender, and socioeconomic divides. In the context of Angola’s digital acceleration efforts, in which it plans to digitalize public services and grow its digital economy (and, critically, introduce a digital ID solution), boosting ID coverage is critical to ensuring that digitalization does not exacerbate exclusion. This ID4D Diagnostic assesses the identification ecosystem in Angola and proposes reforms based on international good practice.
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.
Public Sector Employment and Compensation: An Assessment Framework
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-12-21) World Bank
This paper aims to provide a framework for conducting public sector employment and compensation assessments that can help develop evidence-based reforms. Such a framework is necessary given growing debt distress and the need for greater expenditure efficiency in many of the World Bank’s client countries, and also due to the urgency for addressing global challenges like pandemics, climate change, building human capital, and reducing inequality, all of which require a strong role for the public sector.
Ethics and Corruption in the Federal Public Service: Civil Servants' Perspectives
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-12-09) World Bank
This Survey on Ethics and Corruption in the Federal Public Service was held online from April 28 to May 28, 2021, in partnership with the Office of the Federal Comptroller General (CGU), the Ministry of the Economy, and the National School of Public Administration (ENAP). All civil servants were represented in the sample, totaling 22,130 respondents. The sample covered all federative units and ministries. Most civil servants report having witnessed some sort of unethical practice during their time in the public sector. Of all respondents, 58.7 percent stated that they witnessed some unethical practice during their career in public service. The most frequent practices were using one's position to help friends or family and bending the rules under pressure from one’s superiors. Over the past three years, around one third of all civil servants (33.4 percent) witnessed some unethical practice, according to their reports. Corruption in the public service is multifaceted, thus requiring granular information about its nature, prevalence, and vulnerable actors. In view of its scope, thematic scope, and representativeness, the data generated by the study could become a valuable source for the development of knowledge about corruption in the federal public service. We hope that this Survey on Ethics and Corruption in the Federal Public Service becomes a tool to complement current and future efforts to fight corruption.
ID4D Country Diagnostic: Central African Republic
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-10-19) World Bank
This diagnostic has been conducted with the sole purpose of serving the ongoing development of social protection policy in the country. It is the Bank’s hope that the report will be useful for social protection policy development as intended. The Bank has not agreed with the government to invest in the civil registration and identification sector. The government may consider the use of this report for the activities it will undertake to seek support from the international donor community for such an investment. The report is organized into the following sections: section one gives introduction. Section two examines the identity ecosystem in Central African Republic (CAR) and presents the stakeholders on the supply and demand sides, the identity schemes, the legal framework, and the specific post-crisis identity context; and section three presents the analysis conducted by the World Bank Group and details the main recommendations to build on so social protection actors can promote an efficient and reliable identity ecosystem that can serve the entire Central African population, starting from the most vulnerable.
Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators: Methodology, Insights, and Applications
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-08-18) World Bank
What is the appropriate level of employment in the public sector as a whole and for essential workers like public administrators, teachers, and doctors? Is the public sector wage bill affordable? Does the public sector pay competitive wages compared to the private sector to attract talent while not crowding out private sector jobs? Does the public sector pay equal wages to workers in similar jobs and with similar skills? Does the public sector promote gender equality in employment? And are public sector pay and employment practices contributing to higher public sector productivity, better service delivery, and improved governance? The Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators (WWBI) were developed in response to growing calls to provide more empirical foundation to similar questions on the public workforce. This report sets out to introduce the Indicators estimated from microdata drawn from the labor force and household welfare surveys and augmented with administrative data for 202 economies covering the demographics of the private and public sector workforces, relative wages and premiums, and the public sector wage bill. The report details the methodology used to construct the WWBI, including a description of the data sources and estimations used for the different indicators, presents the main findings emerging from the dataset on core questions, and presents potential policy and research applications of the dataset.
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.
Using New Data to Support Tax Treaty Negotiation
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-07-12) World Bank
This paper introduces the new Tax Treaties Explorer dataset, developed with support from the World Bank and the G-24, and illustrates its use for research by tax treaty negotiators, policy makers, and researchers. The new dataset provides a rich source of data to reexamine existing tax treaty policy, inform negotiation positions, and assess treaty networks. For the first time, it provides a tool to analyze trends in the content of tax treaties, across individual agreements, over time, and between countries. To illustrate the value of such an approach, we replicate a study by Barthel, Busse, and Neumayer (2009), which found a positive association between the presence of a tax treaty and the bilateral stock of FDI. We show that this effect is mainly driven by the withholding tax rates in the treaty rather than by other provisions affecting taxing rights such as permanent establishment. If the outcomes of this proof-of-concept replication are borne out in future research, this would suggest that negotiators can seek the maximum protection of source taxing rights in other parts of the treaty, knowing that this is unlikely to dilute investment-promoting impacts.
Listing State-Owned Enterprises in Emerging and Developing Economies: Lessons Learned from 30 Years of Success and Failure
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-06-23) World Bank
In this report, the authors investigate state-owned enterprise (SOE) listings as a solution to promote local capital markets development. Thus, SOE listings can offer governments an enormous opportunity to kick-start the development of their local capital markets while achieving other divestment objectives, such as harnessing the SOE’s value and raising fiscal revenue. In this report, the authors aim to shed light on this question by investigating emerging and developing economies (EMDE’s) experience with SOE listings over the past 30 years. The authors combine a thorough literature review with a case study analysis of 14 frontier and emerging markets, including interviews with key stakeholders from the public and private sector. In particular, the authors aim to answer the following three questions: (1) what has been the impact of SOE listings on local capital markets development in EMDEs?; (2) what have been the pre-conditions to successfully list a SOE?; and (3) once listed, what have been the drivers for creating a positive impact on capital markets development? Because listings have significant effects on the broader economy and potentially harness the value of SOEs in a different way, this report also attempts to evaluate the impact of SOE listings on other key economic variables - in particular firm performance, the quality of public service delivery, employment, wealth distribution, and fiscal revenue. The sole objective is to provide policymakers with sufficient information to make an educated decision on whether or not SOE listings are a suitable solution for their respective country.