Stand alone books
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Publication
Silver Opportunity: Building Integrated Services for Older Adults around Primary Health Care
(Washington, DC : World Bank, 2023)We live in a rapidly aging world, in which people who are age 60 and older outnumber children under the age of five. This book reveals large and growing gaps in care for older adults in countries at all income levels and shows how to leverage reforms for improving health outcomes for older adults and create healthier, more prosperous communities. Aimed at policy makers and other health and development stakeholders who want to promote healthier aging, Silver Opportunity compiles the latest evidence on care needs and gaps for aging populations. It argues that primary health care should be the cornerstone of integrated service delivery for older people, but that primary health care systems must first build their capacity to respond to older people's health needs. It presents an original framework for policy action to advance primary health care–centered, integrated senior care; documents the experiences of pioneering countries in delivering community-based care to older people; and provides recommendations for decision-makers. The framework presents four policy levers with which to improve health care for seniors—financing, innovation, regulation, and evaluation and measurement—or FIRE. Finally, the book posits that by acting now, countries can leverage population aging to accelerate progress toward health equity and universal health coverage. -
Publication
Collapse and Recovery: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Eroded Human Capital and What to Do about It
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023)Worldwide, the COVID-19 pandemic has been an enormous shock to mortality, economies, and daily life. But what has received insufficient attention is the impact of the pandemic on the accumulation of human capital—the health, education, and skills—of young people. How large was the setback, and how far are we still from a recovery? Collapse and Recovery estimates the impacts of the pandemic on the human capital of young children, school-age children, and youth and discusses the urgent actions needed to reverse the damage. It shows that there was a collapse of human capital and that, unless that collapse is remedied, it is a time bomb for countries. Specifically, the report documents alarming declines in cognitive and social-emotional development among young children, which could translate into a 25 percent reduction in their earnings as adults. It finds that 1 billion children in low- and middle-income countries missed at least one year of in-person schooling. And despite enormous efforts in remote learning, children did not learn during the unprecedentedly long school closures, which could reduce future lifetime earnings around the world by US$21 trillion. The report quantifies the dramatic drops in employment and skills among youth that resulted from the pandemic as well as the substantial increase in the number of youth neither employed nor enrolled in education or training. In all of these age groups, the impacts of the pandemic were consistently worse for children from poorer backgrounds. These losses call for immediate action. The good news is that evidence-based policies can recover these losses. Collapse and Recovery reviews governments’ responses to the pandemic, assessing why there was a collapse in human capital accumulation, what was missing in the policy architecture to protect human capital during the crisis, and how governments can better prepare to withstand future shocks. It offers concrete policy recommendations to recover losses in human capital—programs that will end up paying for themselves in the long term. To better prepare for future shocks such as climate change and wars, the report emphasizes the need for solutions that bring health, education, and social protection programs together in an integrated human development system. If countries fail to act, the losses in human capital documented in this report will become permanent and last for multiple generations. The time to act is now.