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International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) 2024 Annual Report
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-11-05) International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes
The International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) has evolved significantly over the past fifteen years. Demand for ICSID’s services has grown in concert with an increase in foreign investment and an expanding network of international investment agreements. By leveraging new technologies and modernizing procedural rules, ICSID has ensured world-class quality and efficiency in its case administration services. The sustained growth in membership has been a testament to the value States place in ICSID as the only global institution dedicated to international investment dispute settlement. The 2024 fiscal year (FY2024) saw strong demand for ICSID’s services, with the second-highest number of registered and administered cases in ICSID’s history. Also notable over the fiscal year was the sustained progress in enhancing the diversity of arbitrators, conciliators, and ad hoc committee members appointed to ICSID cases. This includes: a record 49 nationalities were represented amongst the appointments made in FY2024; 29 percent of all appointments involved women; 50 percent percent of first-time appointees involved nationals of low- or middle-income economies. Additional highlights in FY2024 include a record number of concluded proceedings, as ICSID continues to work with tribunals and parties to reduce the time of cases. Also, for the first time, a Regional Economic Integration Organization - the European Union was a party to an ICSID proceeding.
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.
The Healthy Longevity Initiative: Key Insights for Policy and Action
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-09-12) Altuwaijri, Sameera; Jha, Prabhat; Alleyne, George; Isenman, Paul; Saadat, Seemeen; Garcia, Gisela; Veillard, Jeremy
The global demographic landscape is at a crossroads, with rapid declines in fertility and aging populations holding profound implications for employment, social services, and wellbeing. Population aging has accelerated the rise of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) as the leading cause of global deaths and are expected to contribute to ninety percent of all deaths by 2040. This has implications for health systems (NCD-related hospitalization) and long-term care as well as for labor markets and social protection systems. There is a need for whole of society approaches and solutions that address equity gaps especially due to poverty and gender inequality, which further exacerbate the challenges. The Healthy Longevity Initiative (HLI) spotlights key high impact interventions in health and social sectors that countries can adapt to address the challenge of changing demographics and growing NCDs. While this requires greater financial outlays, the benefits far outweigh the costs with the potential of saving 150 million lives cumulatively by 2050 in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) alone. Mobilizing support to move from knowledge to action is needed to realize the astounding human and economic benefits of addressing one of the major challenges of the 21st century.
Women, Business and the Law 2024
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-03-04) World Bank
Women, Business and the Law 2024 is the 10th in a series of annual studies measuring the enabling conditions that affect women’s economic opportunity in 190 economies. To present a more complete picture of the global environment that enables women’s socioeconomic participation, this year Women, Business and the Law introduces two new indicators—Safety and Childcare—and presents findings on the implementation gap between laws (de jure) and how they function in practice (de facto). This study presents three indexes: (1) legal frameworks, (2) supportive frameworks (policies, institutions, services, data, budget, and access to justice), and (3) expert opinions on women’s rights in practice in the areas measured. The study’s 10 indicators—Safety, Mobility, Workplace, Pay, Marriage, Parenthood, Childcare, Entrepreneurship, Assets, and Pension—are structured around the different stages of a woman’s working life. Findings from this new research can inform policy discussions to ensure women’s full and equal participation in the economy. The indicators build evidence of the critical relationship between legal gender equality and women’s employment and entrepreneurship. Data in Women, Business and the Law 2024 are current as of October 1, 2023.
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.
Improving Effective Coverage in Health: Do Financial Incentives Work?
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-05-11) de Walque, Damien; Kandpal, Eeshani; Wagstaff, Adam; Friedman, Jed; Neelsen, Sven; Piatti-Fünfkirchen, Moritz; Sautmann, Anja; Shapira, Gil; Van de Poel, Ellen
In many low- and middle-income countries, health coverage has improved dramatically in the last two decades, but health outcomes have not. As such, effective coverage -- a measure of service delivery that meets a minimum standard of quality -- remains unacceptably low. This Policy Research Report examines one specific policy approach to improving effective coverage: financial incentives in the form of performance-based financing (PBF) or financial incentives to health workers on the front lines. The report draws on a rich set of rigorous studies and new analysis. When compared to business-as-usual, in low-income settings with centralized health systems PBF can result in substantial gains in effective coverage. However, the relative benefits of PBF are less clear when it is compared to two alternative approaches, decentralized facility financing which provides operating budget to frontline health services with facility autonomy on allocation, and demand-side financial support for health services (i.e., conditional cash transfers and vouchers). While PBF often results in improvements on the margins, closing the substantial gaps in effective health coverage is not yet within reach for many countries. Nonetheless, there are important lessons learned and experiences from the roll-out of PBF over the last decade which can guide health policies into the future.
World Development Report 2022: Finance for an Equitable Recovery
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-02-15) World Bank
World Development Report 2022: Finance for an Equitable Recovery examines the central role of finance in the economic recovery from COVID-19. Based on an in-depth look at the consequences of the crisis most likely to affect low- and middle-income economies, it advocates a set of policies and measures to mitigate the interconnected economic risks stemming from the pandemic—risks that may become more acute as stimulus measures are withdrawn at both the domestic and global levels. Those policies include the efficient and transparent management of nonperforming loans to mitigate threats to financial stability, insolvency reforms to allow for the orderly reduction of unsustainable debts, innovations in risk management and lending models to ensure continued access to credit for households and businesses, and improvements in sovereign debt management to preserve the ability of governments to support an equitable recovery.
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.