Institutional and Governance Review
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CPIA Africa, September 2023: Policies for Economic Resilience in a Turbulent World
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-09-12)The Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA) for Africa is an annual diagnostic tool for Sub-Saharan African countries that are eligible for financing from the International Development Association (IDA), the part of the World Bank that helps the world’s poorest countries. The CPIA Africa 2023 report provides an assessment of the quality of policies and institutions in all 39 IDA-eligible countries in Sub-Saharan Africa for calendar year 2022. The average overall CPIA score for Sub-Saharan Africa remained unchanged at 3.1 in 2022. Economic and social resilience continues to be tested in all countries in Sub-Saharan Africa amid tight global credit markets, as institutional capacity for restoring stability and delivering sustained growth remains a challenge. Such resilience is also fundamental to responding to global climate change and the expected market shifts as the world economy transitions to green energy. The recovery of economic activity in the region following the slowdown caused by COVID-19 has been multispeed, with wide variation across countries. Global events that diverted attention away from longer-term development priorities marked 2022. Inflation was the predominant form in which international pressures translated to domestic economies in Sub-Saharan Africa, resulting in stress on social policies and government budgets, on account of divergent responses by governments and private sector competition. In some countries, this has led to significant stress on debt sustainability, highlighting the importance of debt management, budgetary oversight, and financial soundness. An opportunity for regrouping on policy reforms arose in the second half of 2022, as gas prices declined after a mild European winter and China lifted health-related restrictions. Despite global economic challenges, more countries in Sub-Saharan Africa saw improvements in their overall CPIA scores compared to the previous year. In Western and Central Africa (AFW), the overall score increased for eight countries—Benin, Cabo Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, the Republic of Congo, and Togo. The overall score increased for four countries in Eastern and Southern Africa (AFE)—Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, and Zambia. In contrast, the overall score decreased for eight countries—Chad, the Comoros, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Sudan. The countries with improved scores made notable advancements in the economic management, policies for social inclusion, and governance clusters. Conversely, the countries with declining scores faced economic management and governance challenges. For the most part, the countries that received downgrades were positioned toward the lower end of the scale, while the upgraded countries generally had overall scores above 3, indicating a growing divergence in scores across the region in 2022. -
Publication
Managing Afghanistan’s Rangelands and Forest Resources: An Assessment of Institutional and Technical Capacity Constraints
(World Bank, Kabul, 2018-06)Afghanistan has been in conflict and internal turmoil since the early 1970s, which has resulted in loss of life, insecurity, ethnic division, and wide-spread damage to the environment and natural resources. As citizens of one of the poorest nations in the world with an increasing poverty level that reached 55 percent in 2016-2017, 80 percent of Afghans depend on natural resources for their daily subsistence. Fodder for livestock, fuel wood for heating and cooking, water for agriculture and consumption, medicinal plants and wildlife provide scarce means for survival and limited trade. The government of Afghanistan is giving agriculture and natural resource management utmost priority for development. Current policies link natural resources management to private sector development, justice sector reform (land administration), agriculture development, mineral and resource development, and human capital development programs. This World Bank paper that highlights the importance of the rangelands and forest resources for the country’s sustainable development. The paper explains the status and role of rangelands and forest resources for the country’s mostly rural population. It describes the importance of the sector for boosting agricultural productivity, addressing climate change and weather- related natural disasters, and contributing to rural jobs creation. It further offers some recommendations on how to revitalize the natural resources management sector that is critically important in the context of rural development and Afghanistan’s economy, and is yet often overlooked and broadly neglected.