Arabic PDFs Available

415 items available

Permanent URI for this collection

The following titles are also available in Arabic. Click on the title link and look toward the bottom of the page to locate the PDFs that can be downloaded for that title.

Items in this collection

Now showing 1 - 10 of 74
  • Publication
    Djibouti Country Climate and Development Report
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-11-19) World Bank Group
    Climate change threatens Djibouti’s development goals and without effective adaptation, could generate economic losses equivalent to nearly four years of today’s output by mid[1]century. Climate change exposes Djibouti to more frequent extreme heat, drought, and floods. These events threaten the infrastructure and services that serve the vibrant trade sector and that could enable a more diversified economy. Other sectors prioritized for diversification, including fisheries, information and communications technology (ICT), and tourism, are also directly impacted by climate change. Unless Djibouti adapts, climate change will also have a particularly negative impact on the livelihoods of the poor, on workers’ productivity, and on water and food security. This Country Climate and Development Report (CCDR) estimates that even a limited set of priority adaptation actions may require 1.1 billion in additional funds, including an additional 77 million per year through 2035. Such investment can be consistent with Djibouti’s goal of achieving both growth and debt sustainability, but it needs to be accompanied by economic reform and additional adaptation resources provided on a concessional basis. International support is particularly warranted given the regional importance of the resilience of Djibouti’s economy.
  • Publication
    Unlocking the Power of Healthy Longevity: Demographic Change, Non-communicable Diseases, and Human Capital
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-09-12) World Bank
    The World Bank has a long history of engaging in population issues, ranging from childhood illness, nutrition, fertility, and safe motherhood to the aging process. It supports countries in addressing the implications of the demographic process through analytical work, technical advice, and financing to expand health coverage, redesign pension systems and social security, and undertake actions that support their economies. This report follows that tradition and analyzes the steps to promote healthy longevity and enhance the quantity and quality of human capital through attention to the burgeoning problem of Non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Research began before COVID and concluded after, drawing upon lessons from the pandemic. The report is intended to inform policy and action at the country level. The demographic transformation is a global phenomenon, and the increasing population of the middle-aged and elderly brings with it many challenges which are more acute in low- and middle-income countries where resources are more limited. The increasing number of adults calls upon countries to institute the social and economic measures of ensuring their wellbeing and making them optimally productive. Health must be at the center of these concerns, not only its preservation towards the end but its optimization throughout the life-course. This report builds on a compendium of analytical papers covering the economics of avoidable mortality, long-term care, behavior change, social protection, and whole-of-government solutions to support healthy longevity. It emphasizes that a great deal of ill health globally is a result of inequities—especially poverty and gender inequities that limit or delay access to and use of health care. High out-of-pocket payments for NCDs can plunge households further into poverty or extreme poverty. Women live longer with NCD morbidities.
  • Publication
    Defueling Conflict Environment and Natural Resource Management as a Pathway to Peace: Executive Summary
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-08-20) World Bank
    Fragile and conflict-affected situations (FCS), environmental degradation, and natural disasters are on the rise and threaten to reverse development gains. In the past decade, violent civil conflicts have tripled and the number of people living in proximity to conflict has nearly doubled, with forced displacement at a record high. The World Bank Group (WBG) Strategy for Fragility, Conflict and Violence (FCV) 2020–2025 marks a shift in the World Bank’s work in fragile and conflict situations, as it adopts a more holistic approach to prevention. The Strategy seeks to enhance the World Bank Group’s effectiveness in supporting countries’ efforts to address the drivers and impacts of FCV and strengthen their resilience, especially for their most vulnerable and marginalized populations. The FCV Strategy explicitly recognizes the importance of climate change as a driver of FCV and as a threat multiplier, as well as the need to address the environmental impacts and drivers of FCV. Delivering on this shift toward preventing conflict underscores the importance of understanding the role the environment and natural resources can have. This report seeks to build a strong narrative on the need for the World Bank Group to engage and invest in environment, natural resource management, and climate change resilience in FCV-affected situations. It further aims at facilitating the integration of a conflict-sensitive lens into World Bank operations and programs addressing natural resource degradation and climate change. The report is divided in six sections: Section 1 sets the Background, Context, and Approach; Section 2 describes the risks associated with the interplay between natural resources, climate change, fragility, and conflict across the conflict cycle; Section 3 connects those causal chains to the delivery of the FCV Strategy across its four pillars; Section 4 showcases a suite of options to improve conflict-sensitive project design and implementation; and Section 5 presents an annotated questionnaire that serves as a complementary tool to the report.
  • Publication
    The Knowledge Compact for Action: Transforming Ideas Into Development Impact - For a World Free of Poverty on a Livable Planet
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-05-07) World Bank
    Today’s global challenges are bigger, more complex, and more intertwined than ever before, from the relentless grip of poverty and stubborn persistence of inequality to the devastations caused by climate disasters, fragility, pandemics, and conflicts. Financing and investments alone cannot solve these problems in a global context of higher debt and scarce resources. Now more than ever, clients are demanding innovative ideas and successful experiences from other countries to tackle the ongoing and emerging global crises, regain the development progress of past decades and move faster towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. At the same time, recent breakthroughs in technology, including the rapid advances in artificial intelligence, offer enormous potential to revolutionize development work. Policymakers and practitioners across the globe are poised to benefit from new tools to innovate, act based on evidence and accelerate the transformation of new ideas into development outcomes that improve lives of the poor. This paper articulates the strategic direction of the Knowledge Compact for Action, which seeks to empower all WBG clients, public and private, by systematically making the latest development knowledge available to respond more effectively to increasingly complex development challenges. The Compact seizes the opportunity of the digital revolution, bringing together the wealth of data analytics, research and best practices accumulated by the WBG over decades and combining this knowledge with the WBG’s proven mix of public-private finance to power learning and innovative solutions. This includes capturing the tacit knowledge embedded in operations for policymakers and development practitioners to easily access lessons of development successes and failures in other countries. Ultimately, the Compact aims to take knowledge to a new level, placing it front and center of the WBG’s work to end extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity on a livable planet.
  • Publication
    Libya Economic Monitor, Fall 2023
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-02-12) World Bank
    Libya’s medium-term growth and development challenges are major and pressing. Key among these is to accelerate and stabilize growth: GDP per capita shrank by 54 percent between 2010 and 2022. Furthermore, Libya’s economy was among the most volatile during the past decade due to the conflict, instability, fragmentation, oil export blockades, and weak economic policies. Another challenge is to diversify the economy to make growth more job-rich, more inclusive to women and youth and less intensive in carbon. This could be achieved by strengthening human capital and rebuilding infrastructure. Building a wide, transparent, and effective cash transfer system could bea transformational approach to reform public finances and the public sector and rebuild trust between citizens and the state. Partly linked to the above is the challenge to address the transparency and equitable sharing of oil resources, including to address regional disparities to reduce risks of conflict and fragility in the interest of building a lasting peace. Lastly, the overall institutional and economic policy framework and capacity need to be strengthened to undertake such major transformation.
  • Publication
    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.
  • Publication
    Libya Economic Monitor, Summer 2022
    (Washington, DC, 2022-08) World Bank
    Libya is struggling to cope with a trifecta of crises, including the civil conflict, the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and most recently, the impact of the Russia-Ukraine crisis. Notwithstanding the tempering of conflict intensity since 2021, the Libyan economy has been battered by the conflict. GDP per capita estimates in 2021 stood at about half of its value in 2010 before the start of the conflict. Since 2020, the population has been hit by multiple waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. The health system, already affected by a decade of conflict, has struggled to deliver the necessary access and quality of care amid a raging pandemic. While Libya has reported a marked decline in COVID-19 cases and deaths since March 2022, the vaccination rate remains low. In addition, food insecurity has worsened, precipitated by the Russia-Ukraine crisis and the resulting shortages and price increases for staple foods in the domestic market.
  • Publication
    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.
  • Publication
    Tunisia Economic Monitor, Winter 2021: Economic Reforms to Navigate Out of the Crisis
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-01-20) World Bank
    The Economic Monitor examines four possible factors behind Tunisia’s slow recovery. First, the drop in mobility related to the pandemic may have been more harmful in Tunisia. However, mobility in Tunisia has dropped to a similar extent as other countries and it has now returned to pre-pandemic levels following the acceleration in the vaccination campaign since July. If anything, the mobility drop in Tunisia has resulted in a lower reduction in economic activity than in comparator countries as Algeria and Egypt. Second, it could be that the level of public support to the ailing firms and households may have been particularly low. However, at 2.3 percent of GDP, the Covid-19 stimulus package in 2020 was in the same ballpark as other comparators in the region. Third, the structure of the Tunisian economy, particularly its reliance on tourism, may have exposed it to the negative demand shock more than other countries. Indeed hotels, cafe and restaurant and transport are the sectors which have contracted the most since the start of the pandemic. The losses of these sectors explain a significant portion of the negative effects of the crisis in Tunisia, although they do not fully account for such slow recovery.
  • Publication
    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.