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Publication
Making the Most of the African Continental Free Trade Area: Leveraging Trade and Foreign Direct Investment to Boost Growth and Reduce Poverty
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-06-30)The creation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) provides a unique opportunity to boost growth, cut poverty, and reduce Africa’s dependence on the boom and-bust commodity cycle. A World Bank (2020) report estimates that the AfCFTA has the potential to raise income in the continent by 7 percent by 2035 and lift 40 million people out of extreme poverty, mainly by spurring intraregional trade (termed the “AfCFTA trade scenario” for purposes of this analysis). Reductions in nontariff barriers on goods and services and improvements in trade facilitation measures will account for about two thirds of the US$450 billion in potential income gains by removing long delays across most of the continent’s borders and lowering compliance costs in trade, making it easier for African businesses to become integrated into regional and global supply chains. This report builds on that earlier study by including potential gains arising from greater flows of foreign direct investment (FDI), termed the “AfCFTA FDI broadscenario,” and from deeper integration beyond trade, the “AfCFTA FDI deep scenario.” FDI has traditionally been low in Africa. The AfCFTA is likely to attract cross-border investment by eliminating tariff and nontariff barriers and replacing the existing patchwork of bilateral and regional trade deals with a single, unified market. Investors in any one of 55 member countries will have access to a continent of 1.3 billion people with a combined GDP of US$3.4 trillion. Integration in global and regional value chains offers a further magnet for FDI and the jobs, investment, and know-how that FDI brings. -
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Africa in the New Trade Environment: Market Access in Troubled Times
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-02-10)Sub-Saharan Africa represents only a small share of global production and trade while hosting half of the extreme poor worldwide. To catch up with the rest of the world, the continent has no alternative: it must undertake reforms to scale up its supply capacity while better linking its production and trade to the global economy. If it does so, it stands to gain from unlimited demand and innovation along the supply chain. Some progress has been made over the past decade, with the region’s exports and imports growing rapidly. Because most African economies rely heavily on trade for a large share of national income, they will also be more vulnerable to the trade disruptions of external shocks, as illustrated by the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Africa in the New Trade Environment: Market Access in Troubled Times provides a comprehensive, state-of-the-art analysis by a team of renowned trade economists who present a strategy to bolster Sub-Saharan Africa’s market access in the current global environment. -
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The Quality of Health and Education Systems Across Africa: Evidence from a Decade of Service Delivery Indicators Surveys
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2021-11-18)Have teachers mastered the subject matter they are teaching? Can doctors accurately diagnose and treat critical health conditions? Are schools and health facilities sufficiently stocked with needed equipment and supplies? Are they sufficiently supported and staffed to optimize learning and health care outcomes? For the past decade, the World Bank’s Service Delivery Indicators (SDI) surveys have collected nationally representative data in countries across Africa to answer these questions. The surveys aim to measure the quality of services where they meet citizens: in schools and health facilities. The Quality of Health and Education Systems Across Africa: Evidence from a Decade of Service Delivery Indicators Surveys identifies areas of achievement and constraint in service delivery, shedding light on how service delivery may foster or stunt human capital accumulation. SDI surveys show that schools and health clinics across Africa are still falling short in some critical areas. The delivery of primary care services is very heterogenous between and within countries. Many health facilities lack the basic necessities to provide proper care, such as essential medicines, basic diagnostic equipment, and adequate water and sanitation. Moreover, health care providers’ ability to diagnose and treat common health conditions correctly is low and distributed unevenly. Health personnel’s absence from health facilities remains a concern across the surveyed countries. Learning is low, and, not unlike health care, levels of student learning vary significantly across countries: less than half of grade 4 students can recite a simple sentence or perform basic mathematical operations. This deficient learning is correlated with teachers’ low levels of content knowledge and sub-par pedagogy skills. Some schools are also missing crucial inputs, such as blackboards or private and gendered toilets, and struggle with high pupil-teacher ratios. Despite these challenges, success stories in both sectors illustrate the quality of service delivery that could be achieved and showcase the dedication of teachers and medical staff across Africa. By studying data from thousands of facilities, considering the local context, and drawing insights from the literature, this book offers important insights for how countries can strengthen health and education systems and build back better in the wake of the massive disruptions brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. -
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The African Continental Free Trade Area: Economic and Distributional Effects
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020-07-27)The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement will create the largest free trade area in the world, measured by the number of countries participating. The pact will connect 1.3 billion people across 55 countries with a combined GDP valued at $3.4 trillion. It has the potential to lift 30 million people out of extreme poverty by 2035. But achieving its full potential will depend on putting in place significant policy reforms and trade facilitation measures. The scope of the agreement is considerable. It will reduce tariffs among member countries and cover policy areas, such as trade facilitation and services, as well as regulatory measures, such as sanitary standards and technical barriers to trade. It will complement existing subregional economic communities and trade agreements by offering a continent-wide regulatory framework and by regulating policy areas—such as investment and intellectual property rights protection—that have not been covered in most subregional agreements. The African Continental Free Trade Area: Economic and Distributional Effects quantifies the long-term implications of the agreement for growth, trade, poverty reduction, and employment. Its analysis goes beyond that in previous studies that have largely focused on tariff and nontariff barriers in goods—by including the effects of services and trade facilitation measures, as well as the distributional impacts on poverty, employment, and wages of female and male workers. It is designed to guide policy makers as they develop and implement the extensive range of reforms needed to realize the substantial rewards that the agreement offers. The analysis shows that full implementation of AfCFTA could boost income by 7 percent, or nearly $450 billion, in 2014 prices and market exchange rates. The agreement would also significantly expand African trade—particularly intraregional trade in manufacturing. In addition, it would increase employment opportunities and wages for unskilled workers and help close the wage gap between men and women. -
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Future Drivers of Growth in Rwanda: Innovation, Integration, Agglomeration, and Competition
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020)A strong and widely acknowledged record of economic success—including a three-and-ahalf- fold increase in per capita income since 1994—places Rwanda among the world’s fastest-growing economies. Traumatic memories of the 1994 genocide are gradually fading, as associations begin to take a more positive form—of a nation on the rise, powered by human resilience, a sense of common purpose, and a purposeful government. Past successes and a sense of frailty have fueled aspirations for a secure, prosperous, and modern future. Sustaining high rates of economic growth is at the heart of these ambitions. Recent formulations of the nation’s Vision 2050 set a target of achieving upper-middleincome status by 2035 and high-income status by 2050. Future Drivers of Growth in Rwanda: Innovation, Integration, Agglomeration, and Competition, a joint undertaking by experts from Rwanda and the World Bank Group, evaluates the country’s possibilities and options in this endeavor. The report identifies four essential drivers of growth—innovation, integration, agglomeration, and competition—and reforms in six priority areas: human capital development, export dynamism and regional integration, well-managed urbanization, competitive domestic enterprises, agricultural modernization, and capable and accountable public institutions. -
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Balancing Petroleum Policy: Toward Value, Sustainability, and Security
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-05-01)Petroleum discovery in a country presents its policy makers with a challenging and complex task: formulating and agreeing on policies that will shape the country’s petroleum sector and guide the translation of the newly discovered resources into equitable and sustainable economic and social growth for the nation over the long term. Balancing Petroleum Policy provides policy makers and other stakeholders with the basic sector-related knowledge they need to embark on this task. It introduces a number of topics: the petroleum value chain and pivotal factors affecting value creation, a consultative process for developing a nation’s common vision on key petroleum development objectives, design of a legislative and contractual framework, petroleum fiscal regimes and their administration, prudent fiscal management, transparency and governance, environmental and social safeguards, and economic diversification through industrial linkages. Although much of the material is relevant to designing policies for the development of the petroleum sector in general, the book gives special focus to developing countries, countries in a federal or devolved setting, and countries that have experienced or are still experiencing civil conflict. With this focus in mind, the book examines three questions—ownership, management, and revenue sharing of petroleum resources—that are central to petroleum policy in any federal or devolved state. It also offers important perspectives on how to prevent violent conflicts related to such resources. Petroleum policies tend to vary significantly from country to country, as do the objectives that such policies aim to achieve in the specific context of each particular country. Although there is no one-size-fits-all policy and there are no clear-cut answers to the many potential policy dilemmas associated with the discovery of petroleum resources, this publication may help policy makers find the right balance among the chosen objectives—and the right policy choices to achieve these objectives. -
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The Africa Competitiveness Report 2017: Addressing Africa’s Demographic Dividend
(Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2017-05-01)Without urgent action to address low levels of competitiveness, Africa’s economies will not create enough jobs for the young people entering the job market. If current policies remain unchanged, fewer than one-quarter of the 450 million new jobs needed in Africa in the next 20 years will be created. These are among the key findings of the Africa Competitiveness Report 2017, a biennial publication jointly produced by the World Economic Forum, the African Development Bank, and the World Bank Group. Priorities to meet the changing demographics include policy reform to improve the quality of institutions, infrastructure, skills and adoption of new technology. House construction and better urban planning present opportunities for short-term competitiveness gains. The report finds that the ability of Africa’s economies to generate enough jobs for its young and growing population rests on the successful implementation of urgent structural reforms to boost productivity. Competitiveness is defined as the set of institutions, policies and factors that determine the level of productivity, and hence future prosperity, of a country. The report, which covers North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, comes at a time when growth in most of the region’s economies has been slowing after a decade of sustained growth. Further stagnation is likely in the absence of improvements in the core conditions for competitiveness. Compounding the challenge to Africa’s leaders is a rapidly expanding population. -
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Africa's Cities: Opening Doors to the World
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2017-02-09)Cities in Sub-Saharan Africa are experiencing rapid population growth. Yet their economic growth has not kept pace. Why? One factor might be low capital investment, due in part to Africa’s relative poverty: Other regions have reached similar stages of urbanization at higher per capita GDP. This study, however, identifies a deeper reason: African cities are closed to the world. Compared with other developing cities, cities in Africa produce few goods and services for trade on regional and international markets To grow economically as they are growing in size, Africa’s cities must open their doors to the world. They need to specialize in manufacturing, along with other regionally and globally tradable goods and services. And to attract global investment in tradables production, cities must develop scale economies, which are associated with successful urban economic development in other regions. Such scale economies can arise in Africa, and they will—if city and country leaders make concerted efforts to bring agglomeration effects to urban areas. Today, potential urban investors and entrepreneurs look at Africa and see crowded, disconnected, and costly cities. Such cities inspire low expectations for the scale of urban production and for returns on invested capital. How can these cities become economically dense—not merely crowded? How can they acquire efficient connections? And how can they draw firms and skilled workers with a more affordable, livable urban environment? From a policy standpoint, the answer must be to address the structural problems affecting African cities. Foremost among these problems are institutional and regulatory constraints that misallocate land and labor, fragment physical development, and limit productivity. As long as African cities lack functioning land markets and regulations and early, coordinated infrastructure investments, they will remain local cities: closed to regional and global markets, trapped into producing only locally traded goods and services, and limited in their economic growth. -
Publication
The World Bank Group A to Z 2016
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2016)Note: Information in this title reflected the institution at the time of publication and may be subject to change... The World Bank Group A to Z provides concise and essential information about the mission, policies, procedures, products, and services of the new World Bank Group. This second edition is a follow-up to the first volume released for the 2014 Annual Meetings. The World Bank Group A to Z series builds on previous editions of A Guide to the World Bank to include features not found in its predecessors including: a graphical introduction to the World Bank Group, highlighting the Bank Group’s goals, financials, regions, and results; examples and photos of Bank Group projects and programs; and tools to guide you to the information you are looking for (even if you don’t know exactly what that is). It also reflects the wide-ranging reforms that have taken place within the World Bank Group in recent years, including the launch of the new World Bank Group Strategy; new approaches to development; the establishment of new Global Practice Groups and Cross Cutting Solutions Areas; and the goal of becoming a “Solutions Bank,” one that will marshal the vast reserves of evidence and experiential knowledge across the five World Bank Group agencies and apply them to local problems. With more than 280 entries arranged in encyclopedic A-to-Z format, readers can easily find up-to-date information about the five agencies of the World Bank Group and the wide range of areas in which they work: from agriculture, education, energy, health, social protection and labor to gender, jobs, conflict, private sector development, trade, water and climate change. The World Bank Group’s work in all of these areas now focuses on two new twin goals: eliminating extreme poverty by 2030 and boosting shared prosperity of the poorest 40 percent in every developing country. -
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The Africa Competitiveness Report 2015
(Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2015-06-01)The Africa Competitiveness Report 2015 comes out at a promising time for the continent: for 15 years growth rates have averaged over 5 percent, and rapid population growth holds the promise of a large emerging consumer market as well as an unprecedented labor force that - if leveraged - can provide significant growth opportunities. Moreover, the expansion of innovative business models, such as mobile technology services, is indicative of the continents growth potential. However, Africa continues to be largely agrarian, with an economy that is underpinned by resource-driven growth and a large and expanding informal sector. Indeed, more than a decade of consistently high growth rates have not yet trickled down to significant parts of the population: nearly one out of two Africans continue to live in extreme poverty, and income inequality in the region remains among the highest in the world. What is more, across sectors - from agriculture to manufacturing and services - productivity levels remain low. It will be necessary to raise productivity across all sectors of the economy to achieve higher growth and create quality employment, and turn this progress into sustainable inclusive growth.