Core Diagnostic Reports
2,722 items available
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Economic and Sectoral Work are original analytic reports authored by the World Bank and intended to influence programs and policy in client countries. They convey Bank-endorsed recommendations and represent the formal opinion of a World Bank unit on the topic. Core diagnostic reports are mandated by the World Bank before lending programs are begun.
Sub-collections of this Collection
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Country Procurement Assessment -
Accounting and Auditing Assessment -
Country Environmental Analysis -
Other Poverty Study -
Country Financial Accountability Assessment -
Debt Management Performance Assessment -
Development Policy Review -
Insolvency Assessment -
Corporate Governance Assessment -
Public Environmental Expenditure Review
Items in this collection
1 - 10 of 2722
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Publication
West Bank and Gaza Public Expenditure Review - The Palestinian Pension System: A Roadmap for an Unfinished Reform
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-09-18)This work builds on the Public Expenditure Review (PER) analysis of the pension system conducted in 2016 but also brings important innovations. It updates the financial analysis conducted then and offers new policy recommendations, with the key objective of improving the affordability of the pension system, subject to benefit adequacy. The principal difference of this work is in the adopted approach, which looks at the pension system holistically and offers advice from the angle of rationalizing the overall public expenditure policy in pensions, rather than working with each pension scheme individually. In doing so, it takes a forward-looking approach and minimizes the dependency path of the convoluted legacy system. The work also incorporates a component that looks at the Palestinian Pension Agency’s (PPA) administrative systems using a new Bank tool – Social Insurance Administrative Diagnostic (SIAD). The findings reveal a system with unfinished reforms and call for a comprehensive restructuring of the pension financing arrangements, along with a change of the construct of the system. This work is largely diagnostic in nature, offering high level policy recommendations and suggesting a comprehensive follow up analysis. While presenting a status quo analysis and illustrating effects of several parametric adjustments, the main set of recommendations is centered around the structural adjustments and financial restructuring in the public sector pension scheme, which would require a round of follow up work, elaborating and modeling various reform cases, including careful fine-tuning of the transitional provisions. -
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The Union of Comoros Country Economic Memorandum: Boosting Growth for Greater Opportunities
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-09-14)Comoros is at the crossroads to redefine its future and become an upper-middle income country by 2050, but this would require implementing an ambitious reform agenda that focuses on increasing productivity and private investment. The current business-as-usual policy framework has delivered low private investment and human capital, sectoral growth below potential, and no poverty eradication. Pursuing this policy framework, which would not allow Comoros to reach the GDP growth target of 7.5 percent by 2030 laid out in the national development plan, could result in GDP per capita of US$1,890 and a poverty rate of 22.9 percent by 2050. By contrast, under a policy framework of ambitious reforms that include measures to increase inclusiveness, Comoros could reach a GDP per capita of US$3,934 and reduce the poverty rate to below 5 percent by 2050. Supported by the continuous implementation of ambitious reforms, such a level of GDP per capita could have Comoros reach upper-middle-income status by 2050. Under this ambitious reform agenda, private investment would average 11.9 percent of GDP in 2023–2050, and total factor productivity growth would average 1.45 percentage points per year during the same period. -
Publication
Central African Republic - Public Expenditure Review in Key Human Development Sectors: Summary
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-09-12)This is an overview of the CAR Human Development (HD) Public Expenditure Review (PER). This overview provides an analytical basis to decision-makers and stakeholders for the formulation of ambitious yet fiscally responsible interventions to improve human capital outcomes in CAR. The PER examines public expenditure trends of the education, health, and social protection (SP) sectors with a focus on adequacy, efficiency, and equity of expenditures as well as human resource management (HRM). The primary objective is to provide analytical insights for government policy development and prioritization strategy as it seeks to achieve a resilient recovery and rebuild its education and health sectors and establish a strong SP system which will help the poorest households invest and protect their own human capital. The PER can also serve as a useful source of knowledge and information to development partners seeking to deepen the impact of their support to the human capital development sectors. The recommendations put forth by the PER are those identified as fiscally sustainable and most important for rebuilding and strengthening human capital development sectors, including a focus on future human resource (HR) recruitment needed in the education and health sectors. -
Publication
CPIA Africa, September 2023: Policies for Economic Resilience in a Turbulent World
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-09-12)The Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA) for Africa is an annual diagnostic tool for Sub-Saharan African countries that are eligible for financing from the International Development Association (IDA), the part of the World Bank that helps the world’s poorest countries. The CPIA Africa 2023 report provides an assessment of the quality of policies and institutions in all 39 IDA-eligible countries in Sub-Saharan Africa for calendar year 2022. The average overall CPIA score for Sub-Saharan Africa remained unchanged at 3.1 in 2022. Economic and social resilience continues to be tested in all countries in Sub-Saharan Africa amid tight global credit markets, as institutional capacity for restoring stability and delivering sustained growth remains a challenge. Such resilience is also fundamental to responding to global climate change and the expected market shifts as the world economy transitions to green energy. The recovery of economic activity in the region following the slowdown caused by COVID-19 has been multispeed, with wide variation across countries. Global events that diverted attention away from longer-term development priorities marked 2022. Inflation was the predominant form in which international pressures translated to domestic economies in Sub-Saharan Africa, resulting in stress on social policies and government budgets, on account of divergent responses by governments and private sector competition. In some countries, this has led to significant stress on debt sustainability, highlighting the importance of debt management, budgetary oversight, and financial soundness. An opportunity for regrouping on policy reforms arose in the second half of 2022, as gas prices declined after a mild European winter and China lifted health-related restrictions. Despite global economic challenges, more countries in Sub-Saharan Africa saw improvements in their overall CPIA scores compared to the previous year. In Western and Central Africa (AFW), the overall score increased for eight countries—Benin, Cabo Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, the Republic of Congo, and Togo. The overall score increased for four countries in Eastern and Southern Africa (AFE)—Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, and Zambia. In contrast, the overall score decreased for eight countries—Chad, the Comoros, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Sudan. The countries with improved scores made notable advancements in the economic management, policies for social inclusion, and governance clusters. Conversely, the countries with declining scores faced economic management and governance challenges. For the most part, the countries that received downgrades were positioned toward the lower end of the scale, while the upgraded countries generally had overall scores above 3, indicating a growing divergence in scores across the region in 2022. -
Publication
Zanzibar Basic Education Public Expenditure Review
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-08-17)Since 2015, because of healthy economic growth and a strong commitment to strengthening human capital, Zanzibar has made significant progress in the provision of good quality basic education services. Government spending has risen and has supported ambitious plans to provide inclusive and equitable access to quality education and skills training. Since 2015, sector targets for increasing access to public services were largely met in education, and in some instances surpassed. Yet despite these significant successes, the basic education sector continues to face challenges in providing good-quality services and reaching the marginalized. This Zanzibar Basic Education Public Expenditure Review aims to: (i) assess the scale of the financing challenge in basic education (preprimary, primary, and secondary education); (ii) analyze the adequacy, efficiency, and equity of current levels and uses of public spending on education; and (iii) from this analysis, and drawing on relevant international practices, present a set of policy suggestions for improvements in public funding for basic education in Zanzibar. -
Publication
Kenya Country Economic Memorandum: Seizing Kenya’s Services Momentum
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-07-31)Kenya’s economy has been growing solidly but maintaining and increasing growth will depend on increasing private investment and productivity. Between 2010 and 2019, Kenya maintained a steady annual growth rate of 5 percent and the economy was able to rebound relatively rapidly from the COVID-19 pandemic. However, productivity growth did not make much of a contribution to output growth, and growth has been lower than that of some other, fast-growing middle-income countries. This points to the potential for Kenya to increase growth via productivity gains, by expanding the role of the private sector and, especially, accelerating private investment. Doing this has become more urgent as the Government's fiscal space to invest has shrunk, making it crucial also for the sustainability of growth to identify new opportunities for the private sector to contribute. This Country Economic Memorandum (CEM) focuses on the question of how seizing opportunities in Kenya’s services sector can contribute more effectively to long-term economic growth. This report argues that growing the services sector should not be seen as an alternative to industrialization, but rather as an enabler of economy-wide growth, including in manufacturing, and in agriculture too. It focuses on five channels through which services contribute to jobs, economic transformation and inclusion: (i) the need to SHIFT the services sector to higher value-added activities; (ii) how to LINK services better to other economic activities to grow its enabling role; (iii) how to BOOST the productivity of the sector through technology and increasing competition; (iv) how to TRADE more services through removing regulatory barriers to trade and investment; and finally (v) how to SECURE people’s economic livelihoods better, especially those working in lower-skilled and economically more vulnerable services subsectors. Growing the contribution of services will require a program of structural reforms and complementary efforts. -
Publication
2022 Comoros Public Expenditure Review: Addressing Fiscal Challenges to Foster an Inclusive Growth
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-07-28)The Union of the Comoros is a small-island country in Eastern Africa that recorded a modest economic expansion and suffered from various fiscal challenges during the last decade that had an impact on long-term growth. Limited fiscal space to address development needs explains the country’s low human capital and poor quality infrastructure, which in turn hamper efforts to increase productivity and private sector growth. In addition, due to low performing State-owned enterprise (SOEs) and weakening economic performance, Comoros faces significant fiscal risks. The analysis presented in this PER supports the efforts of the government of Comoros to enhance public expenditure efficiency, create fiscal space, and limit fiscal risks. The analysis is designed to focus on public investment management (PIM) and public financial management (PFM), identify reforms that could yield fiscal and efficiency gains, and assess the governance of SOEs. -
Publication
Mozambique Poverty Assessment, June 2023: Poverty Reduction Setback in Times of Compounding Shocks
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-07-28)This report relies on several data sources. The main source providing the poverty, inequality and labor figures herein is the 2019/20 Household Budget Survey (Inquérito sobre Orçamento Familiar, IOF2019/2020) conducted by the National Statistical Institute (Instituto Nacional de Estatística, INE) starting in November 2019 and spanning 13 months. The survey’s sample was drawn from the 2017 Census and allows for poverty figures to be representative at national and provincial as well as rural and urban levels. The fieldwork included data collection from 13,297 households interviewed across four quarters as in previous surveys, to account for seasonality effects like the impact on households’ consumption of relatively more abundant post-harvest periods. The starting point for the analysis is chapter 1, which synthesizes progress in reducing poverty between 2014-15 and 2019-20. This chapter also looks at the regional distribution of poverty, the impact of the pandemic, multidimensional poverty, the profile of the poor, changes in the responsiveness of poverty to growth, discusses trends in non-monetary dimensions of wellbeing, and simulates future poverty trends. Chapter 2 examines the distribution of growth and inequality reduction over the period, the pandemic’s impact, discusses the growth-poverty-inequality relationship, assesses the spatial dimensions of poverty, and estimates the Human Opportunity Index for Mozambique. Chapter 3 focuses on labor markets and provides insights into labor force participation, unemployment, underemployment, employment sectors, child labor, and labor market demand conditions. Chapter 4 presents a fiscal incidence analysis and information on transfers. Chapter 5 examines the relevance of environmental shocks, assesses the impact of weather events on agricultural production and night-time light radiance in urban areas. It also models poverty and distributional impacts of climate change shocks and presents findings on climate change literacy in Mozambique. Finally, chapter 6 discusses a variety of policy implications. -
Publication
Enabling Foreign Direct Investment in the Renewable Energy Sector: Reducing Regulatory Risks and Preventing Investor-State Conflicts
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-07-26)Increasing private investment is critical to meeting the growing energy needs in developing countries. Foreign direct investment (FDI) can contribute significantly—by bridging the financing gap but also by facilitating knowledge and technology transfer. A key factor impeding the ability of countries to attract and retain FDI is political risk - more specifically, a subset of political risks—risks caused by government’s own regulatory actions. Such risks can also lead to costly legal disputes between investors and states. This report explores these risks in the renewable energy (power generation) sector, the prevalence of investor-state disputes associated with such risks, the fiscal and reputational implications of disputes, and policy options for governments to prevent them -
Publication
Thailand Public Revenue and Spending Assessment, June 2023: Promoting an Inclusive and Sustainable Future
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-07-13)Having implemented a substantial fiscal response to COVID-19, Thailand’s government now faces the medium-term challenge of reducing elevated deficit and debt levels, and the structural challenge of meeting rising spending needs, including those associated with an aging population, while maintaining fiscal sustainability. In this context, this Public Revenue and Spending Assessment sets out revenue and expenditure choices that will help to ensure a more inclusive and sustainable economy. This will require raising revenue, improving the efficiency of public spending, and ensuring that revenue and spending policy measures support the most vulnerable and are responsive to climate-related challenges. Within this overall framework, the report provides several recommendations to improve the quality of spending in the health, education, and social protection sectors, as well as a detailed assessment of fiscal policies that will contribute to the achievement of climate mitigation and adaptation goals.