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Publication
Opening Remarks at the 2019 Annual Meetings Opening Press Conference
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-10-17)David Malpass, President of the World Bank Group, highlighted the urgent priorities for discussion with shareholders. Global growth is slowing. Investment is sluggish, manufacturing activity is soft, and trade is weakening. The challenges of climate change and fragility are making poor countries more vulnerable. This backdrop makes our goals of reducing extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity even harder. He suggested that with the right mix of policies and structural reforms, countries can unleash growth that's broadly shared across all segments of society. He spoke about how the Bank is helping countries build strong programs tailored to the unique circumstances of their economies. He highlighted the importance of education. He mentioned the proposed IDA replenishment, and reaffirmed commitment to projects on climate and on gender inclusion. In conclusion, he said that the well-designed structural reforms are needed to unlock growth and build the foundations for future prosperity. -
Publication
Tracking SDG 7: The Energy Progress Report 2019
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-05-22)The Global Energy Progress Report 2019 provides a global dashboard on progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG7), which sets 2030 targets for reaching universal access to electricity and clean fuels and technologies for cooking, substantially increasing the share of renewable energy in the global mix, and doubling the rate of improvement of energy efficiency. All the data used in this pamphlet comes from the respective official source: for electrification, the World Bank; for clean fuels and technologies for cooking, the World Health Organization (WHO); for renewable energy, the International Energy Agency (IEA), the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) and the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA); and for energy efficiency, the IEA and UNSD. All projections are from the IEA’s World Energy Outlook. This report identifies best practices that have proven successful in recent years, as well as key approaches that policy makers may deploy in coming years. Recommendations applicable to all SDG 7 targets include recognizing the importance of political commitment and long-term energy planning, stepping up private financing, and supplying adequate incentives for the deployment of clean technology options. The following sections review progress in electricity access, access to clean cooking solutions, renewable energy, and energy efficiency. The Energy Progress Report reviews progress to 2017 for energy access and to 2016 for renewable energy and energy efficiency, against a baseline year of 2010. Its methodology is detailed at the end of each chapter. -
Publication
Uncharted Waters: The New Economics of Water Scarcity and Variability
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-10-24)The 21st century will witness the collision of two powerful forces – burgeoning population growth, together with a changing climate. With population growth, water scarcity will proliferate to new areas across the globe. And with climate change, rainfall will become more fickle, with longer and deeper periods of droughts and deluges. This report presents new evidence to advance understanding on how rainfall shocks coupled with water scarcity, impacts farms, firms, and families. On farms, the largest consumers of water in the world, impacts are channeled from declining yields to changing landscapes. In cities, water extremes especially when combined with unreliable infrastructure can stall firm production, sales, and revenue. At the center of this are families, who feel the impacts of this uncertainty on their incomes, jobs, and long-term health and welfare. Although a rainfall shock may be fleeting, its consequences can become permanent and shape the destiny of those who experience it. Pursuing business as usual will lead many countries down a “parched path” where droughts shape destinies. Avoiding this misery in slow motion will call for fundamental changes to water policy around the globe. Building resilience to rainfall variability will require using different policy instruments to address the multifaceted nature of water. A key message of this report is that water has multiple economic attributes, each of which entail distinct policy responses. If water is not managed more prudently—from source, to tap, and back to source—the crises observed today will become the catastrophes of tomorrow. -
Publication
The Cost of Air Pollution: Strengthening the Economic Case for Action
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-09-08)The Cost of Air Pollution: Strengthening the economic case for action, a joint study of the World Bank and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), seeks to estimate the costs of premature deaths related to air pollution, to strengthen the case for action and facilitate decision making in the context of scarce resources. An estimated 5.5 million lives were lost in 2013 to diseases associated with outdoor and household air pollution, causing human suffering and reducing economic development. Those deaths cost the global economy about US$225 billion in lost labor income in 2013 and more than US$5 trillion in welfare losses, pointing toward the economic burden of air pollution. -
Publication
High and Dry: Climate Change, Water, and the Economy
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-05-03)The impacts of climate change will be channeled primarily through the water cycle, with consequences that could be large and uneven across the globe. Water-related climate risks cascade through food, energy, urban, and environmental systems. Growing populations, rising incomes, and expanding cities will converge upon a world where the demand for water rises exponentially, while supply becomes more erratic and uncertain. They will jeopardize growth prospects in the regions worst affected and in some of the poorest countries. These challenges are not insurmountable, however, and smart policies that induce water-use efficiency, align incentives across regional and trading partners, and invest in adaptive technologies can go a long way toward reducing or eliminating these negative effects. -
Publication
World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society, and Behavior
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2015)Every policy relies on explicit or implicit assumptions about how people make choices. Those assumptions typically rest on an idealized model of how people think, rather than an understanding of how everyday thinking actually works. This year’s World Development Report argues that a more realistic account of decision-making and behavior will make development policy more effective. The Report emphasizes what it calls 'the three marks of everyday thinking.' In everyday thinking, people use intuition much more than careful analysis. They employ concepts and tools that prior experience in their cultural world has made familiar. And social emotions and social norms motivate much of what they do. These insights together explain the extraordinary persistence of some social practices, and rapid change in others. They also offer new targets for development policy. A richer understanding of why people save, use preventive health care, work hard, learn, and conserve energy provides a basis for innovative and inexpensive interventions. The insights reveal that poverty not only deprives people of resources but is an environment that shapes decision making, a fact that development projects across the board need to recognize. The insights show that the psychological foundations of decision making emerge at a young age and require social support. The Report applies insights from modern behavioral and social sciences to development policies for addressing poverty, finance, productivity, health, children, and climate change. It demonstrates that new policy ideas based on a richer view of decision-making can yield high economic returns. These new policy targets include: the choice architecture (for example, the default option); the scope for social rewards; frames that influence whether or not a norm is activated; information in the form of rules of thumb; opportunities for experiences that change mental models or social norms. Finally, the Report shows that small changes in context have large effects on behavior. As a result, discovering which interventions are most effective, and with which contexts and populations, inherently requires an experimental approach. Rigor is needed for testing the processes for delivering interventions, not just the products that are delivered.