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  • Publication
    Women, Business and the Law 2019: A Decade of Reform
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-02-27) World Bank Group
    The World Bank Group’s Women, Business and the Law examines laws and regulations affecting women’s prospects as entrepreneurs and employees across 187 economies. Its goal is to inform policy discussions on how to remove legal restrictions on women and promote research on how to improve women’s economic inclusion. Women, Business and the Law 2019: A Decade of Reform introduces a new index measuring legal rights for women throughout their working lives in 187 economies. The index is composed of 35 data points grouped into eight indicators. The data covers a 10-year period not only to understand the current situation but to see how laws affecting women’s equality of opportunity have evolved over time. The index assesses economic rights at milestones spanning the arc of a woman’s working life: the ability to move freely; starting a job; getting paid; legal capacity within marriage; having children; running a business; managing assets; and getting a pension.
  • Publication
    World Development Report 2019: The Changing Nature of Work
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2019) World Bank
    Work is constantly reshaped by technological progress. New ways of production are adopted, markets expand, and societies evolve. But some changes provoke more attention than others, in part due to the vast uncertainty involved in making predictions about the future. The 2019 World Development Report will study how the nature of work is changing as a result of advances in technology today. Technological progress disrupts existing systems. A new social contract is needed to smooth the transition and guard against rising inequality. Significant investments in human capital throughout a person’s lifecycle are vital to this effort. If workers are to stay competitive against machines they need to train or retool existing skills. A social protection system that includes a minimum basic level of protection for workers and citizens can complement new forms of employment. Improved private sector policies to encourage startup activity and competition can help countries compete in the digital age. Governments also need to ensure that firms pay their fair share of taxes, in part to fund this new social contract. The 2019 World Development Report presents an analysis of these issues based upon the available evidence.
  • Publication
    The World Bank Annual Report 2018
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018-09-28) World Bank
    The Annual Report is prepared by the Executive Directors of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the International Development Association (IDA)--collectively known as the World Bank--in accordance with the by-laws of the two institutions. The President of the IBRD and IDA and the Chairman of the Board of Executive Directors submits the Report, together with the accompanying administrative budgets and audited financial statements, to the Board of Governors.
  • Publication
    World Development Report 2018: Learning to Realize Education's Promise
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018) World Bank
    Every year, the World Bank's World Development Report takes on a topic of central importance to global development. The 2018 Report, Learning to Realize Education's Promise, is the first ever devoted entirely to education. Now is an excellent time for it: education has long been critical for human welfare, but is even more so in a time of rapid economic change. The Report explores four main themes. First, education's promise: Education is a powerful instrument for eradicating poverty and promoting shared prosperity, but fulfilling its potential requires better policies - both within and outside the education system. Second, the learning crisis: Despite gains in education access, recent learning assessments show that many young people around the world, especially from poor families, are leaving school unequipped with even the most foundational skills they need for life. At the same time, internationally comparable learning assessments show that skills in many middle-income countries lag far behind what those countries aspire to. Third, promising interventions to improve learning: Research from areas such as brain science, pedagogical innovations, or school management have identified interventions that promote learning by ensuring that learners are prepared, that teachers are skilled as well as motivated, and that other inputs support the teacher-learner relationship. Fourth, learning at scale: Achieving learning throughout an education system will require more than just scaling up effective interventions. Change requires overcoming technical and political barriers by deploying salient metrics for mobilizing actors and tracking progress, building coalitions for learning, and being adaptive when implementing programs.
  • Publication
    World Development Report 2017: Governance and the Law
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2017-01-30) World Bank Group
    Why are carefully designed, sensible policies too often not adopted or implemented? When they are, why do they often fail to generate development outcomes such as security, growth, and equity? And why do some bad policies endure? This book addresses these fundamental questions, which are at the heart of development. Policy making and policy implementation do not occur in a vacuum. Rather, they take place in complex political and social settings, in which individuals and groups with unequal power interact within changing rules as they pursue conflicting interests. The process of these interactions is what this Report calls governance, and the space in which these interactions take place, the policy arena. The capacity of actors to commit and their willingness to cooperate and coordinate to achieve socially desirable goals are what matter for effectiveness. However, who bargains, who is excluded, and what barriers block entry to the policy arena determine the selection and implementation of policies and, consequently, their impact on development outcomes. Exclusion, capture, and clientelism are manifestations of power asymmetries that lead to failures to achieve security, growth, and equity. The distribution of power in society is partly determined by history. Yet, there is room for positive change. This Report reveals that governance can mitigate, even overcome, power asymmetries to bring about more effective policy interventions that achieve sustainable improvements in security, growth, and equity. This happens by shifting the incentives of those with power, reshaping their preferences in favor of good outcomes, and taking into account the interests of previously excluded participants. These changes can come about through bargains among elites and greater citizen engagement, as well as by international actors supporting rules that strengthen coalitions for reform.
  • Publication
    World Development Report 2016: Digital Dividends
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2016-01-13) World Bank Group
    The 2016 World Development Report shows that while the digital revolution has forged ahead, its “analog complements”—the regulations that promote entry and competition, the skills that enable workers to access and then leverage the new economy, and the institutions that are accountable to citizens—have not kept pace. And when these analog complements to digital investments are absent, the development impact can be disappointing.
  • Publication
    World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society, and Behavior
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2015) World Bank Group
    Every policy relies on explicit or implicit assumptions about how people make choices. Those assumptions typically rest on an idealized model of how people think, rather than an understanding of how everyday thinking actually works. This year’s World Development Report argues that a more realistic account of decision-making and behavior will make development policy more effective. The Report emphasizes what it calls 'the three marks of everyday thinking.' In everyday thinking, people use intuition much more than careful analysis. They employ concepts and tools that prior experience in their cultural world has made familiar. And social emotions and social norms motivate much of what they do. These insights together explain the extraordinary persistence of some social practices, and rapid change in others. They also offer new targets for development policy. A richer understanding of why people save, use preventive health care, work hard, learn, and conserve energy provides a basis for innovative and inexpensive interventions. The insights reveal that poverty not only deprives people of resources but is an environment that shapes decision making, a fact that development projects across the board need to recognize. The insights show that the psychological foundations of decision making emerge at a young age and require social support. The Report applies insights from modern behavioral and social sciences to development policies for addressing poverty, finance, productivity, health, children, and climate change. It demonstrates that new policy ideas based on a richer view of decision-making can yield high economic returns. These new policy targets include: the choice architecture (for example, the default option); the scope for social rewards; frames that influence whether or not a norm is activated; information in the form of rules of thumb; opportunities for experiences that change mental models or social norms. Finally, the Report shows that small changes in context have large effects on behavior. As a result, discovering which interventions are most effective, and with which contexts and populations, inherently requires an experimental approach. Rigor is needed for testing the processes for delivering interventions, not just the products that are delivered.
  • Publication
    Resource Financed Infrastructure : A Discussion on a New Form of Infrastructure Financing
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2014-05-29) Halland, Havard; Land, Bryan; Schmidt, James
    This report, consisting of a study prepared by global project finance specialists Hunton and Williams LLP and comments from six internationally reputed economists and policy makers, provides an analytical discussion of resource financed infrastructure (RFI) contracting from a project finance perspective. The report is meant as a forum for in-depth discussion and as a basis for further research into RFI's role, risks, and potential, without any intention to present a World Bank, supported view on RFI contracting. It is motivated by the conviction that if countries are to continue to either seeks RFI or receive unsolicited RFI proposals, there is an onus on public officials to discern bad deals from good, to judge unavoidable trade-offs, and to act accordingly. The report aims to provide a basis for developing insights on how RFI deals can be made subject to the same degree of public policy scrutiny as any other instrument through which a government of a low or lower-middle-income country might seek to mobilize development finance. The report also feeds into the global mainstreaming of 'open contracting,' providing citizens with the means to engage with governments and other stakeholders on how nonrenewable resources are best managed for the public benefit. In the case of RFI, there is a very direct link made between the value of resources in the ground and the development of (infrastructure) benefits. It should not be a surprise, therefore, that the revised Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) Standard, adopted in May 2013, addresses extractive transactions with an infrastructure component, including RFI.
  • Publication
    The World Bank Annual Report 2014
    (Washington, DC, 2014) World Bank
    The Annual Report is prepared by the Executive Directors of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the International Development Association (IDA)—collectively known as the World Bank—in accordance with the by-laws of the two institutions. The President of the IBRD and IDA and the Chairman of the Board of Executive Directors submits the Report, together with the accompanying administrative budgets and audited financial statements, to the Board of Governors.
  • Publication
    MIGA Annual Report 2014 : Insuring Investments, Ensuring Opportunities
    (Washington, DC: World Bank Group, 2014) Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency
    In 2014, the World Bank Group adopted a joint strategy for dealing with impediments to ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity. One of the strategy’s key elements underscores the essential role private sector investment can play working alongside public sector support to bear down on the most challenging development issues client countries face, such as job creation, infrastructure deficits, and climate change. MIGA’s role has become increasingly valuable in delivering results to achieve these twin goals as demonstrated by the increased demand for our political risk insurance and credit enhancement products that facilitate the expansion of private investment into emerging markets. In fiscal year 2014, MIGA issued a record $3.2 billion in new guarantees while our gross exposure reached $12.4 billion. MIGA’s added value stems from our ability to mobilize private sector investment in environments that are often beyond the risk tolerance of commercial sources of capital. This past fiscal year, MIGA worked with various stakeholders to develop our own strategy that aligns our objectives with the World Bank Group’s twin goals and underscores our aspiration to achieve significant development impact beyond what we can do alone. To achieve this, MIGA will need to be financially sustainable by prudently managing our risks, covering operating costs, and creating financial latitude by growing the Agency’s capital base.