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Colombia - Poverty and Equity Assessment: Trajectories - Prosperity and Poverty Reduction in the Colombian Territory
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-17) World Bank Group
This report, Trajectories: Prosperity and Poverty Reduction in the Colombian Territory, explores the factors behind the lower capacity of many to lead productive lives in Colombia, particularly their lower accumulation of assets. It examines how this capacity persistently differs across municipalities and departments and across gender, ethnicity, and migratory status. The report’s focus on assets highlights poor people’s capacity to generate income and escape poverty. It, therefore, adopts an assets-based approach, which recognizes that the capacity of an individual or household to generate market income depends on the assets they possess, their human, physical, financial, social, and natural capital, and how they subsequently use those assets in markets to generate income. Addressing territorial inequalities has been recognized as a policy priority in Colombia, and this report brings new evidence to the public debate. With nearly two out of five future workers living in poorer areas, a failure to invest in the productive capacity of these younger generations is a missed opportunity for higher economic growth potential. Specifically, the report makes four main contributions. First, it brings new evidence on regional inequalities to the public debate through new data and measures that go beyond what has been traditionally produced and that zoom in to a more granular geographical level: the municipality. This provides new insights into the challenges at hand and their heterogeneity across the country. The report prepares and presents, for instance, municipal data on incomes and poverty and their evolution, allowing an assessment of patterns and drivers of progress. Second, its analytical anchoring in the assets-based approach puts the focus on people and their ability to lead productive lives. Third, through this focus on assets, it provides a multisectoral view of the challenges to addressing territorial inequalities in access to opportunities and accordingly offers a multidimensional view of the policy discussion it proposes. Finally, the report suggests policy principles and examples to inform the broader debate on reducing poverty and inequality across Colombia.
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.
Choosing Our Future: Education for Climate Action
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-09-04) Sabarwal, Shwetlena; Venegas Marin, Sergio; Spivack, Marla; Ambasz, Diego
Education can propel faster and better climate action in two crucial ways. First, education can galvanize behavior change at scale - not just for tomorrow, but also for today. Second, education can unlock skills and innovation to shift economies onto greener trajectories for growth. At the same time, education needs to be protected from climate change. Extreme climate events and temperatures are already eroding hard-won progress on schooling and learning. Climate change is causing school closures, learning losses, and dropouts. These will turn into long-run inter-generational earnings losses putting into jeopardy education’s powerful potential for spurring poverty alleviation and economic growth. Governments can act now to adapt schools for climate change in cost-effective ways. This report outlines new data, evidence, and examples on how countries can harness education to propel climate action. It provides an actionable policy agenda to meet development, education, and climate goals together, recognizing that tackling climate change requires changes to individual beliefs, behaviors, and skills – changes that education is uniquely positioned to catalyze.
The Impact of Climate Change on Education and What to Do about It
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-05-02) Venegas Marin, Sergio; Schwarz, Lara; Sabarwal, Shwetlena
Education can be the key to ending poverty in a livable planet, but governments must act now to protect it. Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as cyclones, floods, droughts, heatwaves and wildfires. These extreme weather events are in turn disrupting schooling; precipitating learning losses, dropouts, and long-term impacts. Even if the most drastic climate mitigation strategies were implemented, extreme weather events will continue to have detrimental impacts on education outcomes.
Learning Can’t Wait: Lessons for Latin America and the Caribbean from PISA 2022
(Inter-American Development Bank (“IDB”) and The World Bank, 2024-03-04) Arias Ortiz, Elena; Bos, Maria Soledad; Chen Peraza, Juliana; Giambruno, Cecilia; Levin, Victoria; Oubiña, Victoria; Pineda, Jasmine Anne; Zoido, Pablo
This report explores the results of the latest round of PISA for countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), showcasing the results for the region, the differences within the region and between the region and the rest of the world. For this round of PISA, 14 countries of LAC participated in the assessment, representing the largest number of LAC countries in the assessment since its inception. The report covers three key insights: (1) learning is low and highly unequal in LAC, (2) for most countries trends in learning are not moving in the right direction; and (3) countries in LAC should ensure that all students acquire at least basic proficiency in foundational skills, by addressing disparities and focusing on the effective use of technology.
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.
Making Teacher Policy Work
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-11-08) World Bank
This report zooms into what lies behind the success or failure of teacher policies: how teachers experience these policies, and how systems scale and sustain these policies. The report argues that for policies to be successful, they need to be designed and implemented with careful consideration of the barriers that could hinder teachers’ take-up of the policy (individual-level barriers), and the barriers that could hinder the implementation and sustainability of policies at scale (system-level barriers). Teacher polices too often fail to yield meaningful changes in teaching and learning because both their design and implementation overlook how teachers perceive, understand, and act in response to the policy and because they miss what is needed at a system level to achieve and sustain change. To avoid this, policymakers need to go beyond what works in teacher policy to how to support teachers in different contexts to adopt what works, while making sure it is implementable at scale and can be sustained over time. This requires unpacking teacher policies to consider the barriers that might hinder success at both the individual and system levels, and then putting in place strategies to overcome these barriers. The report proposes a practical framework to uncover the black box of effective teacher policy and discusses the factors that enable their scalability and sustainability. The framework distills insights from behavioral science to identify the barriers that stand in the way of the changes targeted by the policy and to develop strategies to overcome them. The framework is used to examine questions such as: What changes are required at an individual level to achieve the specific goals of a given teacher policy What barriers constrain the adoption of these changes How can the policy be better designed and implemented to tackle these barriers Moreover, the report draws on evidence from quantitative and qualitative studies on successful and failed teacher policies to examine the factors that make teacher policy operationally and politically feasible such that it can work at scale and be sustained over time.
Building Better Formal TVET Systems: Principles and Practice in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
(Washington D.C., Paris, Geneva: The World Bank, UNESCO, and ILO, 2023-07-25) World Bank; UNESCO; ILO
Reform of formal technical and vocational education and training (TVET) is urgently needed in most low- and middle-income countries. Demographic trends, coupled with higher rates of students completing lower levels of education, can lead to an exponential increase in the number of secondary TVET students in the next 20 years, particularly in low-income countries (LICs). However, there are significant risks attached to expanding a system that is often considered a second-tier educational track and to which challenged learners are often directed. Because of a broken link between TVET systems and labor markets in low- and middle-income countries (LICs and MICs, together: L/MICs), TVET cannot deliver on its promise. The urgency is compounded by megatrends associated with globalization, technological progress, demographic transformation, and climate change, which affect both skills demand and the distribution of economic opportunities. This report offers guidance to policymakers designing and implementing TVET reforms, emphasizing core principles and practical considerations for L/MICs. There is much to be learned from recent L/MIC reform experiences like those in Bangladesh, El Salvador, and Mongolia, about identifying effective reform strategies and the likely impact of megatrends on future demand for TVET. The report focuses on secondary and post-secondary non-tertiary formal TVET, defined as TVET obtained within the formal education system that leads to diplomas, degrees, or other formal certifications. This overview, summarizing the main messages from the report, has three parts. The first, the TVET Promise, looks at the potential of TVET systems to deliver access to equitable, quality, and relevant training and contribute to employment and productivity. The second, the TVET Challenge, articulates the main limitations in practice for L/MIC TVET systems. The third, the Way Forward to Better TVET, proposes three interrelated transformations (three E’s) and six policy priorities to help TVET deliver on its promise in L/MICs.
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.
Facilitating the School to Work Transition of Young Women
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-11) Ubfal, Diego
In Latin America and the Caribbean, the school-to-work transition is more challenging for girls than boys due to societal norms. Young women who drop out of school are more likely to be employed in less stable, lower-paid jobs in the informal sector. Work-study programs can help to address the gender gaps in the school-to-work transition. In Uruguay, a national work-study program offered by a lottery system significantly improved the school-to-work transition for young girls and boys. Key features of the program included providing high-quality jobs with a focus on human capital accumulation that is compatible with schooling.