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Remarks by World Bank Group President Ajay Banga at the 2024 Annual Meetings Plenary
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-28) Banga, Ajay
In his speech at the 2024 Annual Meetings Plenary, World Bank Group President Ajay Banga highlighted the organization's achievements over its 80-year history and outlined its future direction. He emphasized the dual focus on reconstruction and development, reflecting on the World Bank's origins and its evolving role in addressing global challenges such as poverty, climate change, conflict, and pandemics. Banga discussed the need for the World Bank to be faster, simpler, and more impact-oriented. He noted improvements in project approval times, streamlined processes, and enhanced collaboration with other multilateral development banks. He also highlighted the importance of measurable outcomes and increased lending capacity to maximize the institution's impact.
Investment Framework for Nutrition 2024
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-09-23) Shekar, Meera; Shibata Okamura, Kyoko; Vilar-Compte, Mireya; Dell’Aira, Chiara
In 2017, the Investment Framework for Nutrition set the stage for transformative nutrition investments, culminating in strong donor and country commitments at the 2021 Tokyo Nutrition for Growth (N4G) Summit. Now—with only six years left until the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) end date of 2030—the world is facing polycrises, including food and nutrition insecurity; climate shocks; fiscal constraints; and rising rates of overweight, obesity, and noncommunicable diseases in low- and middle-income countries. Despite a 44 percent decline in child stunting between 1990 and 2022, global progress is insufficient, as increasing anemia rates among women of reproductive age as well as stagnating rates of child stunting, wasting, low birthweight, and rising obesity among children and adults persist. Nutrition is a marker of human capital, and both obesity and undernutrition are key contributors to the Human Capital Index. As we approach the 2025 Paris N4G, investing to address global nutrition challenges has become more critical than ever. Investment Framework for Nutrition 2024 broadens the focus of the 2017 Investment Framework for Nutrition to include low birthweight and obesity, and it adds policy considerations, operational guidance for country-level implementation, and gender and climate change perspectives. Financially, an additional $13 billion is needed annually to scale up a discrete set of evidence-based nutrition interventions to 90 percent coverage ($13 per pregnant woman and $17 per child under age five per annum), with the largest needs in South Asia (34 percent of total global needs) and Sub-Saharan Africa (26 percent of total needs). These investments need to be complemented with a strategically designed package of policies to influence consumer preferences by modifying the social and commercial determinants of health and dietary behaviors. The economic benefits of scaling up nutrition investments far outweigh the costs and offer substantial returns on investment. Innovative financing mechanisms—including responsible private sector engagement and climate funds, together with measures to enhance the efficiency of the existing financing—are vital to bridge the funding gap. A global effort is essential now to renew financial commitments, explore new funding avenues, and drive nutrition-positive investments—with the ultimate goal of enhancing health, human capital, economic growth, and sustainability.
Recipe for a Livable Planet: Achieving Net Zero Emissions in the Agrifood System
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-09-20) Sutton, William R.; Lotsch, Alexander; Prasann, Ashesh
The global agrifood system has been largely overlooked in the fight against climate change. Yet, greenhouse gas emissions from the agrifood system are so big that they alone could cause the world to miss the goal of keeping global average temperatures from rising above 1.5 centigrade compared to preindustrial levels. Greenhouse gas emissions from agrifood must be cut to net zero by 2050 to achieve this goal. Recipe for a Livable Planet: Achieving Net Zero Emissions in the Agrifood System offers the first comprehensive global strategic framework to mitigate the agrifood system’s contributions to climate change, detailing affordable and readily available measures that can cut nearly a third of the world’s planet heating emissions while ensuring global food security. These actions, which are urgently needed, offer three additional benefits: improving food supply reliability, strengthening the global food system’s resilience to climate change, and safeguarding vulnerable populations. This practical guide outlines global actions and specific steps that countries at all income levels can take starting now, focusing on six key areas: investments, incentives, information, innovation, institutions, and inclusion. Calling for collaboration among governments, businesses, citizens, and international organizations, it maps a pathway to making agrifood a significant contributor to addressing climate change and healing the planet.
Unleashing Adaptive Potential for Social Protection: Good Adaptive Social Protection Practices in Latin America and the Caribbean
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-05-08) Tisei, Francesco; Ed, Malin
The report is structured around four chapters and begins by offering a comprehensive overview of the region's climate and disaster risk profile in Chapter 1. This is followed by chapter 2 which provides a snapshot of the status of social protection systems in the region. Chapter 3 conducts a detailed analysis of the World Bank's stress test assessments in the LAC region, showcasing good practices and overarching weaknesses categorized according to the building blocks of the Adaptive Social Protection (ASP) framework. Building on the assessment findings, chapter 3 also provides a set of transnational emerging recommendations geared towards the advancement of the ASP agenda in LAC. Chapter 4 takes a forward-looking approach, exploring the World Bank's role in contributing to making social protection systems in the region more adaptive. This chapter also touches upon crucial issues within the region, including migration and the high levels of informality, thereby providing a broader perspective on the challenges and opportunities surrounding the advancement of this crucial agenda in the LAC countries.
Towards a More Competitive, Inclusive, and Resilient Agrifood Sector in Argentina
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-04-05) World Bank
Argentina’s agrifood sector drives both prosperity and crisis. While agrifood generates essential foreign currency earnings, tax revenue and employment, the sector’s vulnerability to external shocks can wreak havoc on the larger economy. This agriculture sector review addresses the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of Argentina’s agrifood sector. The economic dimension is vital, due to the influence of agrifood productivity and its growth on Argentina’s macroeconomy. The social, or inclusion, dimension highlights the potential to improve the livelihoods of the rural poor as well as access to affordable food for the urban poor. Finally, the environmental dimension examines the urgent need to increase the resilience of agricultural production systems and support their adaptation to climate change, as well as the agrifood sector’s potential to mitigate climate change and other externalities. This summary report is based on a series of more detailed sectoral background papers and is aimed at public sector policymakers and other key stakeholders, with the goal of identifying potential reforms in public policies and programs and contributing to the development of a new shared vision for the Argentine agrifood sector.
Poverty and Distributional Impact of Fiscal Policy in Dominican Republic
(Washington, DC, 2023-11-28) World Bank
This report assesses the impact of fiscal policy, both revenue and expenditure, on inequality and poverty in the Dominican Republic. On the revenue side, the analysis focuses on the personal income tax, the value added tax (tax on the transfer of industrialized goods and services, known as ITBIS in the Dominican Republic for its initials in Spanish) and excise taxes on alcoholic beverages, cigarettes, fuel products and telecommunication services. These taxes combined accounted for 7.8 percent of GDP in 2018, equivalent to 60 percent of total tax revenues. On the expenditure side, the analysis focuses on social protection benefits like direct cash and near-cash transfers (e.g., the school food-program and the school uniforms and supplies program), indirect subsidies (energy, water, and public transport), and in-kind benefits on education and health, which together account for 39.2 percent of total government expenditures and 85.9 percent of social expenditures. The remainder of this report is organized as follows: Section II describes the Dominican Republic’s tax systems and government spending in 2018 and compares them with those of selected Latin American countries. Section III includes a description of the data, methodology and assumptions made in carrying out the analysis in this report. The main results are provided in Section IV, starting with fiscal policy’s net impact on inequality, followed by its impact on poverty incidence. A comparison with other countries is then provided. Section IV also includes a detailed analysis of the distributional impact of taxes, social spending, and subsidies, to demonstrate their impact on the welfare of the poor. The report’s main conclusions are presented in Section V.
Corresponding Adjustment and Pricing of Mitigation Outcomes
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-11-14) World Bank
Every country has mitigation opportunities in different sectors with varying costs depending on several factors such as the maturity of technologies, access to finance, policy support, and natural resources available. A country can plan its nationally determined contribution (NDC) based on such abatement cost information and prepare its strategy to achieve the NDC most effectively. The provision of Corresponding Adjustment under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement is an important factor to consider when the country decides to engage in international carbon markets. When the host country transfers authorized emission reduction credits or internationally transferred mitigation outcomes (ITMOs), Corresponding Adjustment creates an obligation and the associated liability for the host country, i.e., the host country has to increase its NDC burden by the volume transferred. Without informed decisions, countries may oversell and end up having to implement more expensive mitigation activities to meet their NDCs. This potential liability to the host country is linked to the marginal cost and the associated opportunity cost of meeting the NDC. The Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM)2 suggests that many or most host countries would need to charge Corresponding Adjustment fees well above US25 dollars/ tCO2e in addition to the cost of the emission reduction credits. Such Corresponding Adjustment cost is NDC-specific and varies depending on the level of NDC ambition. Each country can derive its own Corresponding Adjustment costs through modelling exercises3, and the more ambitious the host country’s NDC is, the higher the cost is. This opportunity cost-based pricing approach is one possible way to mitigate the overselling risks (risking the NDC compliance) linked to corresponding adjustment. Alternative approaches include: earmarking mitigation activities that go beyond host country NDC compliance needs and selling them at a price that covers the costs of respective mitigation activity; setting a uniform corresponding adjustment fee in linkage to a global least-cost scenario to achieve the 2030 NDC pledges or the climate goals of the Paris Agreement; and auctioning ITMOs. Advantages and disadvantages of each approach are provided in chapter 5. Lastly, developing suitable institutional structures is important to ensure that such pricing approaches are appropriately considered and assessed by the government and used to effectively support achieving the NDC commitments. Chapter 6 suggests establishing a sovereign climate fund as one possible institutional structure with an illustration of potential transaction flows.
MIGA Annual Report 2023
(Washington, DC, 2023-10-17) Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency
Celebrating thirty-five years since its founding, in FY23 MIGA issued a record 6.4 billion in new guarantees across forty projects. Through these projects, the Agency remained focused on encouraging private investors to help host governments manage and mitigate political risks. In FY23, as it did during the COVID-19 pandemic, MIGA demonstrated its agility to respond to crisis, employing multiple products during the year to assist the embattled people of Ukraine following Russia’s invasion. An institution of the World Bank Group, MIGA is committed to strong development impact and supporting projects that are economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable. MIGA helps investors mitigate the risks of restrictions on currency conversion and transfer, breach of contract by governments, expropriation, and war and civil disturbance. It also offers trade finance guarantees, as well as credit enhancement on obligations of sovereigns, sub-sovereigns, state-owned enterprises, and regional development banks.
Collapse and Recovery: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Eroded Human Capital and What to Do about It
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023) Schady, Norbert; Holla, Alaka; Sabarwal, Shwetlena; Silva, Joana; Yi Chang, Andres
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.
The World Bank Annual Report 2022: Helping Countries Adapt to a Changing World
(Washington, DC : World Bank, 2022) 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 submit the Report, together with the accompanying administrative budgets and audited financial statements, to the Board of Governors.