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Poverty Traps in Argentina - Poverty and Equity Assessment
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-11-11) World Bank
Argentina faces persistently high poverty rates, which have shown an upward trend in recent years, despite increased resources aimed at mitigating poverty.
Equatorial Guinea Economic Update, 2nd Edition: Designing Fiscal Instruments for Sustainable Forestry
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-29) World Bank
This is the second edition of the Economic Update for Equatorial Guinea. This World Bank report presents recent economic developments in Equatorial Guinea, the medium-term economic outlook and risks as well as structural challenges (Chapter 1), followed by a detailed exploration of a specific topic (Chapter 2). This edition focuses on fiscal instruments for sustainable forestry, examining the current socio-economic context of forest policy in Equatorial Guinea. In particular, it discusses the role and current use of forest-related fiscal instruments, and proposes options and trade-offs in the design of forest related fiscal policy reforms to adequately capture resource rents, promote forest based value-addition and employment, mitigate deforestation and forest degradation. The objectives of the Equatorial Guinea Economic Update are to: (i) strengthen the analytical underpinnings of the policy dialogue; and (ii) contribute to an informed debate on policy options to enhance macroeconomic management and development outcomes.
Panama Systematic Country Diagnostic
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-22) World Bank
This Systematic Country Diagnostic (SCD) Update assesses the evolution of Panama’s development challenges and policy priorities since the publication of the SCD in 2015. During the last eight years, Panama has experienced three major changes in its economic and social landscape: (i) economic growth, though still high, has structurally slowed down, affecting job creation and employment quality; (ii) human capital formation has not improved substantially, and the country is struggling to address the significant deterioration in education and health indicators that occurred due to the COVID-19 pandemic; and (iii) the government has demonstrated an increasingly acute awareness of the country’s vulnerability to climate change. In addition, Panama’s income per capita had the highest level of convergence within the region, reflecting its strong economic performance over the last three decades. However, the country’s remarkable gains in per capita income have not been accompanied by a commensurate improvement in economic inclusion and institutional quality. In this context, the SCD Update begins by providing an overview of Panama’s recent growth dynamics and poverty trends, before analyzing the country’s development challenges and discussing key policy priorities for achieving sustainable, inclusive, and resilient growth.
Bioeconomy Paraguay: Innovation and Economic Diversification
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-08-12) World Bank
This report aims to inform the Government of Paraguay about the economic potential of an innovative bioeconomy to diversify exports and create better jobs. There are a number of innovative, biobased sectors with significant growth potential globally and in Paraguay, that could contribute to Paraguay’s economic diversification. However, to build on this potential, Paraguay would need to expand its innovation capabilities to enter sectors such as bioplastics, biopharmaceuticals, forestry and wood, ecotourism and other ecosystem services, such as carbon markets for export. A wide range of products can be produced from wood, and wood pulp can serve as an alternative input material for textiles. Besides wood itself, the forests or plantations in which it grows can also provide non-wood forestry products such as cosmetics, biopharmaceuticals, or food additives. Paraguay can also expand its bioplastics production to take advantage of a global market that is expected to grow between 35–45% through 2027. In part, this is because large buyers, such as car manufacturers, have committed to purchase bioplastics. Further market opportunities are also evident in ecotourism and carbon financing, both fast-growing service industries with potential to contribute to conservation of natural capital assets.
From Landlocked to Land of Opportunity: Paraguay Country Economic Memorandum
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-07-09) World Bank
Paraguay has been a beacon of macroeconomic stability, but like the rest of the region, its average growth has moderated since 2013, which has affected the pace of poverty reduction. To accelerate growth and poverty reduction, it is important to continue to increase resilience against external shocks, productivity, and the sustainability of growth. Improving the quality and efficiency of public institutions, market efficiency, innovation, education, and infrastructure will promote economic productivity. Diversifying exports away from unprocessed commodities will strengthen economic resilience but will be a lengthy process. Meanwhile, the continued commitment to stable macroeconomic and fiscal policies, a deepened financial sector, and risk mitigation policies will increase economic resilience. Paraguay does not have to choose between profitability and sustainability: both are possible and complementary. Greener growth will yield a stronger, more prosperous economy.
Argentina Country Economic Memorandum: A New Growth Horizon - Improve Fiscal Policy, Open Markets, and Invest in Human Capital
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-06-20) World Bank Group
Argentina’s production capabilities, characterized by its abundant natural capital assets and well-educated workforce, have the potential to drive sustained and inclusive economic growth. Argentina is home to diverse natural resources, including the world’s second-largest deposits of lithium, and the second-largest gas shale and fourth-largest shale oil reserves. Its fertile land makes it a major agricultural producer, ranking third in soybean production worldwide. Human capital is rooted in its historically high-quality education and health services, as well as notable achievements in knowledge-intensive sectors such as research and innovation. This report identifies three key constraints to sustaining growth in Argentina. First and foremost, macroeconomic volatility is largely responsible for poor growth outcomes: high policy uncertainty and fiscal procyclicality have contributed to a cycle of booms and crashes. Volatility is also driven by an increasing overreliance on primary commodities. Stubborn and high inflation in addition to abrupt changes in exchange rates reduce planning horizons for long-term investment and impede the development of capital markets. Second, restrictive trade policies, in place partly because of macroeconomic imbalances, prevent Argentina from leveraging its vast comparative advantages to reap the benefits of international trade. Third, while human capital is among Argentina’s greatest assets, its quality is gradually declining. Without corrective policies, the skills of the country’s workforce could fall rapidly behind those demanded by a dynamic, technology-driven, knowledge-intensive global economy.
State and Trends of Carbon Pricing 2024
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-05-21) World Bank
This report provides an up-to-date overview of existing and emerging carbon pricing instruments around the world, including international, national, and subnational initiatives. It also investigates trends surrounding the development and implementation of carbon pricing instruments and some of the drivers seen over the past year. Specifically, this report covers carbon taxes, emissions trading systems (ETSs), and crediting mechanisms. Key topics covered in the 2024 report include uptake of ETSs and carbon taxes in low- and middle- income economies, sectoral coverage of ETSs and carbon taxes, and the use of crediting mechanisms as part of the policy mix.
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.
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.
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.