08. Working Papers

12,043 items available

Permanent URI for this collection

http://hdl.handle.net/10986/8

This collection includes high-quality, informal series and other mixed content collections (typically of article-length items). These are often works in progress disseminated for discussion purposes and some of these papers have not been peer reviewed externally. The book-sized titles in the formally-published World Bank Working Papers series can be found under Books.

Sub-collections of this Collection

IEG Methods and Evaluation Capacity Development Working Paper Series

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 12043

Welfare and Climate Risks in Coastal Bangladesh: The Impacts of Climatic Extremes on Multidimensional Poverty and the Wider Benefits of Climate Adaptation

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-03-23) Verschuur, Jasper ; Becher, Olivia ; Schwantje, Tom ; van Ledden, Mathijs ; Kazi, Swarna ; Urrutia, Ignacio

It is widely recognized that climate hazards impact the poor disproportionately. However, quantifying these disproportionate hazard impacts on a large scale is difficult given limited information on households’ location and socioeconomic characteristics, and incomplete quantitative frameworks to assess welfare impacts on households. This paper constructs a household-level multidimensional poverty index using a synthetic household dataset of 43 million people residing in the coastal zone of Bangladesh. Households are spatially linked to the critical infrastructure networks they depend on, including housing; water, sanitation, and hygiene; electricity; education; and health services. Combined with detailed cyclone hazard data, the paper first quantifies risks to households, agriculture, and infrastructure. It then presents a novel framework for translating critical infrastructure impacts into the temporary incidence of service deprivations, which can contribute to temporary deprivations and hence multidimensional poverty. The paper uses this framework to evaluate the benefits of various adaptation options. The findings show that asset risk due to flooding is US$483 million per year at present, increasing to US$750 million per year in 2050 under climate change. Households face an average infrastructure service disruption of two days per year, which is expected to increase to 4.6 days per year in 2050. This, in turn, would incur a temporary increase in multidimensional poverty (7.2 percent of people are multidimensionally poor at the baseline) of up to 94 percent (2.9 million people) 30 days after an extreme cyclone event (a 1-in-100 years event) at present and 153.9 percent (4.8 million people) in the future. The paper quantifies the large welfare benefits of upgrading embankments, showing how apart from significant risk reduction, these interventions reduce service disruptions by up to 70 percent in some areas and can help up to 1.6 million (0.23 million under current and proposed programs) people from experiencing some form of temporary poverty. Overall, the paper identifies poor households exposed to climate impacts, as well as those prone to falling into poverty temporarily, both of could help to mainstream equity considerations in new adaptation programs.
Institutional Trust, Perceptions of Distributive Unfairness, and Income across Salvadoran Municipalities

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-03-23) Depetris-Chauvin, Emilio

Using multiple waves of two public opinion surveys and a two-way fixed effect model, this paper analyzes how people’s perceptions and attitudes towards public institutions shifted with the business cycle in El Salvador during 2004–2018. It finds that individuals’ levels of trust toward both the president and the municipal government are positively associated with higher levels of income at the municipality level. Income is also a strong predictor of trust in mass media, confidence in the judicial system and, to a lesser extent, trust in the national legislature but income does not affect trust in the Catholic Church. The relationship between income and trust toward the president and municipalities masks a relevant heterogeneity from a rural-urban divide as well as from differences in municipal state capacity. Further, views of income distribution fairness as well as preferences for democracy are positively shaped by municipality-specific business cycles. In contrast, neither generalized trust nor satisfaction with democracy is empirically associated with income at the municipality level.
Leaning in at Home: Women's Promotions and Intra-household Bargaining in Bangladesh

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-03-23) Uckat, Hannah

It is established that entering employment improves a woman's bargaining position in the household. This paper investigates whether a woman's career advancement further improves her intra-household bargaining power. The analysis exploits quasi-random participation in a career promotion program in Bangladesh's garment industry to causally estimate the impact of women's promotion on household decision-making. The findings show that women who participate in the promotion program gain bargaining power as measured by higher expenditures on women (51%) and girls (74%), and on remittances (58%). The promotion-related income effect only partially explains these increases, suggesting that women gain more agency over household income more generally. Further, these new female managers now serve as role models to their staff. The paper finds that the direct effects spill over to women who are quasi-randomly exposed to the new female managers, who also report more say in household decisions. Complementarities between women's positions in the workplace and in the household appear important.
Doing Business in the European Union 2021: Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands (with focus on the Netherlands)

(Washington DC, 2023-03-23) World Bank

Doing Business provides objective measures of business regulations and their enforcement across one hundred ninety-one economies. It is founded on the principle that economic activity benefits from clear rules: rules that allow voluntary exchanges between economic actors, set out strong property rights, facilitate the resolution of commercial disputes, and provide contractual partners with protections against arbitrariness and abuse. This report highlights divergences in regulatory performance including in the implementation of the regulatory framework at the local level among ten Dutch cities. It analyzes the regulatory hurdles faced by entrepreneurs and suggests ways to make it easier to do business across the five areas benchmarked by providing good practice examples from the Netherlands and other EU member states.
Offshoring Response to High-Skilled Immigration: A Firm-Level Analysis

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-03-23) Ghose, Devaki ; Wang, Zhiling

Using a policy change in the Netherlands in 2012 that made it easier and less costly for firms to employ high-skilled short-stay non-European Union workers and a matched employer-employee data, this paper shows that firms in high-skill industries respond by both employing a higher share of non-European Union immigrants and increasing the total amount of offshoring to non-European Union countries. With reduced costs of hiring short-stay non-European Union workers, small firms hire and fire more non-European Union workers in a given year. Many of these workers return to their home countries, establishing direct connections that boost offshoring to firms in the Netherlands. By contrast, large firms absorb some of the workers leaving the small firms. These workers also establish connections between their host and origin countries, boosting offshoring.
Nature-Based Solutions for Climate Resilience in the World Bank Portfolio

(Washington DC, 2023-03-21) World Bank

Countries are facing increasingly complex climate-related challenges, which undermine resilience and require integrated and innovative solutions. Nature-based solutions (NBS) have emerged as cost-effective alternatives to conventional gray infrastructure, delivering greater resilience in the longer term and providing a host of additional benefits. NBSs are defined as actions to protect, conserve, restore, sustainably use and manage natural or modified terrestrial, freshwater, coastal and marine ecosystems, which address social, economic and environmental challenges effectively and adaptively, while simultaneously providing human well-being, ecosystem services and resilience and biodiversity benefits. NBSs that are used with the explicit objective of reducing climate and disaster risks are called NBS for climate resilience. Related terms could include eco-DRR (disaster risk reduction), NBS for disaster risk management, or ecosystem-based adaptation. However, NBSs for climate resilience also provide other benefits such as provision of food or drinking water or opportunities for recreation and climate regulation. NBSs for climate resilience are applied across different geographies. As GPNBS scales-up its effort to provide targeted support to World Bank task teams and clients, monitoring and tracking the NBS footprint in the World Bank’s portfolio will remain a key tool. This paper aims to inform World Bank and GFDRR leadership, donors, clients, and the global community on the World Bank’s progress in mainstreaming NBS for climate resilience, and to inform decisions on targeting capacity building efforts and technical support to operations.
Personal Income Tax Piggybacking

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-03-17) Chattha, Muhammad Khudadad ; Blum, Jürgen René ; Kelly, Roy

Personal income tax (PIT) piggybacking is a local surcharge levied by Subnational government (SNGs) on top of the taxable personal income or on the personal income tax liability already being levied by the central government. In contrast to tax sharing arrangements, piggybacking provides more SNG autonomy since the SNG is granted the power to set and levy the piggybacking rate, typically within certain bounds established by the central government, thereby strengthening the accountability between SNGs and their residents. Different versions of PIT piggybacking have been implemented largely in high-income countries, including Denmark, Norway, US, Canada, Spain, and Portugal. Croatia, a middle-income country, has adopted a PIT piggybacking system. While PIT piggybacking is an important source of SNG revenue in these countries, if Indonesia were to adopt a PIT piggyback, it would be one of the first few major middle-income countries to do so.
Unblocking Sector Financing for Universal Access to Water Supply and Sanitation in Kenya: Sector Note, February 2023

(Washington DC, 2023-03-14) World Bank

This note summarizes the findings of the water supply and sanitation subsector review conducted through the lens of a public expenditure and institutional review. The review seeks to support the government in addressing the challenges impeding the sector’s performance by highlighting the reforms needed to expand the financing for achieving universal water supply and sanitation coverage
Stocktaking of Adaptive Social Protection and Disaster Risk Management

(Washington DC, 2023-03-13) World Bank

In today’s global environment, countries face various shocks, such as natural hazards, economic and health crises, conflict, violence, and forced displacement. Disasters triggered by natural hazards cause billions of dollars in damage per year, and these disasters, and their costs, are increasing because of population growth, rapid and unplanned urbanization, low quality infrastructure, and ineffective disaster risk governance. Climate change is expected to increase the frequency and intensity of hydro meteorological natural hazards, exacerbating disaster damages and losses and disproportionately affecting low-income countries. The objectives of this note are to provide a brief overview of the ASP concept and framework, outline synergies between ASP and disaster risk management (DRM) to build resilience to disaster and climate shocks and highlight current practices that take advantage of synergies between SP and DRM to develop and implement components for effective ASP systems. The note is based on a review of the GFDRR’s portfolio of grants supporting DRM and SP activities. The case studies highlight the operational experiences of World Bank–financed projects that have benefitted from GFDRR grants to contribute to risk-informed ASP. These experiences are expected to help DRM and SP practitioners and policy makers initiate discussions and design ASP programs that increase disaster resilience.
Potential Growth Prospects: Risks, Rewards, and Policies

( 2023-03-10) Kilic Celik,Sinem ; Kose, M. Ayhan ; Ohnsorge,Franziska

Potential output growth around the world slowed over the past two decades. This slowdown is expected to continue in the remainder of the 2020s: global potential growth is projected to average 2.2 percent per year in 2022–30, 0.4 percentage point below its 2011-21 average. Emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) will face an even steeper slowdown, of about 1.0 percentage point to 4.0 percent per year on average during 2022–30. The slowdown will be widespread, affecting most EMDEs and countries accounting for 70 percent of global GDP. Global potential growth over the remainder of this decade could be even slower than projected in the baseline scenario—by another 0.2–0.9 percentage point a year—if investment growth, improvements in health and education outcomes, or developments in labor markets disappoint, or if adverse events materialize. A menu of policy options is available to help reverse the trend of weakening economic growth, including policies to enhance physical and human capital accumulation; to encourage labor force participation by women and older adults; to improve the efficiency of public spending; and to mitigate and adapt to climate change, including infrastructure investment to facilitate the green transition.