Core Diagnostic Reports

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http://hdl.handle.net/10986/2108

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.

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North Macedonia Public Finance Review - Education

(Washington, DC, 2023-03-17) World Bank

This section of the Public Finance Review (PFR) assesses the level, quality, efficiency, and equity of public spending on education in North Macedonia and recommends policies that could increase efficiency as well as outcomes. It also examines the status of recent education reforms in the country and provides directions that can contribute to a better education system in North Macedonia.
Uzbekistan Public Expenditure Review, December 2022: Better Value for Money in Human Capital and Water Infrastructure

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

This second public expenditure review (PER) examines the effectiveness of government spending in Uzbekistan, with a particular focus on education, health, social protection, and water resources management. Fiscal policy and transparency reforms implemented recently in Uzbekistan have supported strong economic management through the reforms and helped realign public spending to new priorities emerging from Uzbekistan’s ambitious transformation. Improvements in fiscal policy and public financial management have played an important role in creating a stable macroeconomic environment for reforms to continue. The focus of public finance reforms over the past few years has been to strengthen aggregate fiscal control, management, and oversight. After years of fiscal policy reforms in 2017–21, shifting sectoral focus on delivering better public services to more citizens is timely and much needed. There are significantopportunities to improve the quality of public services by making public spending at the sector level more effective, financially sustainable, and efficient. The emphasis of the government’s reforms is now shifting toward improving public spending effectiveness and service quality at the sector level. This PER looks at several of the most critical services that citizens largely depend on the government for: health, education, social protection, and water.
Honduras Poverty Assessment: Toward a Path of Poverty Reduction and Inclusive Growth

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-02) Robayo-Abril, Monica ; Rude, Britta ; Cadena, Kiyomi ; Espino, Ilya

Honduras, already among the poorest countries in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region, experienced weak poverty reduction in 2014–19 compared to other countries in the region. The COVID-19 pandemic and Hurricanes Eta and Iota led to a rise in poverty from 2019 to 2020; it is likely that poverty will remain above prepandemic levels in 2021. The economic rebound in 2021, as well as the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, led to an increase in food prices; at the same time, Honduras’s population is vulnerable to rising food prices and food insecurity is high. In 2019, the extreme poor spent almost half of their income on food. Additionally, food insecurity was persistently high. A striking feature of Honduras is the deep and widening urban-rural divide in terms of quality of life. There is a wide urban-rural poverty gap for both the moderate and the extreme poor, which reflects significant disparities in access to basic services such as electricity, water, and sanitation, and internet usage, as well as lower human capital accumulation and worsen labor market indicators in rural areas. While overall income inequality has been stagnant since 2014, inequality in rural areas has increased while in urban areas it has declined. The country is one of the most unequal countries in LAC. Hondurans continue to face deep and persistent disparities in access to and quality of education, with rural areas heavily penalized, even before the COVID-19 pandemic, despite high spending on education. Subnational disparities are particularly large; poverty continues to be most heavily concentrated in the country’s southwestern areas, in departments with higher shares of ethnic minorities, and in municipalities located in the south and southwest. This report focuses on the factors that have contributed to these observed poverty and inequality trends and patterns in Honduras.
Poverty Mapping in El Salvador

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-02) Robayo-Abril, Monica ; Rude, Britta

Poverty mapping, the spatial representation and analysis of human wellbeing and poverty indicators is becoming an increasingly important instrument for investigating and discussing socioeconomic issues, informing targeting efforts, and guiding the geographic allocation of resources. One approach to addressing poverty is the geographic approach. In the geographic approach, poor people are identified and targeted through poverty maps. Indeed, the geographical approach is one of the methods used worldwide for targeting anti-poverty programs to reduce the gaps in social protection coverage of poor and vulnerable groups, and it has been widely implemented in several countries around the world. In 2020, the Salvador's General Directorate of Statistics and Censuses (DIGESTYC) and the World Bank started working on the project ‘Poverty mapping in El Salvador‘. The project is part of the government and International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) Programme, which is performed by experts of the National Statistical Institute (NSI) and the World Bank (WB). The main objective is to calculate the shares of households living in moderate and extreme poverty at disaggregated territorial levels (municipalities). Poverty mapping enhances our understanding of the geographic distribution of people living in poverty. This report presents poverty maps at the municipality level based on the Fay-Herriot model for small-area estimations.
Serbia – Toward a More Effective, Efficient, Equitable and Resilient Health System

(World Bank, Washington DC, 2023) Nguyen, Ha Thi Hong ; Djukic, Predrag ; Zajeganovic-Jakovljevic, Jelena ; Misic, Ivana ; Sormaz, Nemanja ; Gajic-Stevanovic, Milena

The health system in Serbia faces significant challenges arising from a long-term demographic trend and the recent shock caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Serbia’s population is aging at a rapid pace, and the share of the population aged 65 and above almost doubled —from 9.6 percent to 18.7 percent—between 1990 and 2019. This, coupled with high prevalence of unhealthy lifestyle factors, such as smoking, heavy drinking, and high consumption of fatty and sugary diet, has contributed to a rapidly rising burden of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). Addressing NCDs exerts significant financial pressure on the health system that has been further squeezed after more than two years of dealing with COVID-19. This is all happening in a context where the economic contraction that began in 2020 after the advent of COVID-19 pandemic and compounded with the war in Ukraine has adversely affected the country’s capacity to pay for health. The health system also has a challenge to meet population expectations, which have become more demanding after decades of strong economic growth.
Cambodia Poverty Assessment: Toward a More Inclusive and Resilient Cambodia

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-11) Karamba, Wendy ; Tong, Kimsun ; Salcher, Isabelle

This poverty assessment evaluates Cambodia’s poverty reduction progress between 2009 and 2019 and contributing factors. Based on the authors understanding of contributing factors, the assessment asks what the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been, and what will be needed to support inclusive recovery. The Royal Government of Cambodia (RGC) recently updated the national poverty lines for Cambodia. Prompted by Cambodia’s transition to lower middle-income status in 2015, the RGC revisited the poverty measurement methodology in 2017; the review confirmed that the way Cambodians live and spend today has changed considerably as the country became richer, and that the national poverty lines needed revising to better reflect economic realities. This assessment uses the new poverty lines to evaluate Cambodia between 2009 and 2019, coupled with other data sources. This poverty assessment covers 5 chapters. Chapter 1 examines the progress Cambodia made in reducing poverty and boosting shared prosperity between 2009 and 2019. Chapter 2 examines the evolution of nonmonetary poverty between 2009 and 2019. Chapter 3 examines the profile of poverty and inequality in 2019/20. Chapter 4 examines the 2019 fiscal system and its effects on poverty and inequality in 2019/20. Chapter 5 examines COVID-19 socio-economic effects on Cambodian Households in 2020.
Nigeria Public Finance Review: Fiscal Adjustment for Better and Sustainable Results

(Washington, DC, 2022-11) World Bank

The Nigeria Public Finance Review is part of a programmatic effort of fiscal analytics that the World Bank is conducting with the Nigerian government. Ongoing analyses is shared as presentations and technical notes in a continuous dialogue. The emphasis is on establishing a baseline understanding of key fiscal management challenges, and on highlighting reform options to support the government’s agenda to strengthen revenue and expenditure policies and programs to tackle Nigeria’s key development challenges.
Debt Management Performance Assessment (DeMPA) Subnational Government: La Paz Municipality (Bolivia)

(Washington, DC, 2022-10) World Bank

The Bolivian economy is gradually recovering from the pandemic-induced recession. La Paz Municipality primary balance has fluctuated near balance as this municipality managed to cushion the decline in hydrocarbon revenues and the pandemic. The DeMPA assessment for the Autonomous Municipal Government of La Paz (Gobierno Autónomo Municipal de La Paz) – GAMLP was undertaken by applying the 2016 methodology available for local governments at the time of the mission. The Subnational DeMPA (SN DeMPA) is a methodology for assessing public debt management performance through a comprehensive set of indicators spanning the full range of government debt management functions. This report is divided in 4 sections. Section 2 briefly describes the economic background of the country, and more specifically of the Municipality of La Paz (including challenges and changes brought by COVID-19 pandemics) and presents an overview of the local government debt portfolio. Section 3 summarizes the applied methodology for the assessment and discloses assigned scores for each of the 13 Debt Performance Indicators and the 31 sub-indicators. Finally, section 4 provides details for each assessed sub-indicators, pointing for the requirements that are met for the assigned score, and what is missing for the GAMLP achieving improved scores in a future assessment.
CPIA Africa, October 2022: Assessing Africa’s Policies and Institutions

(Washington, DC, 2022-10) World Bank

The Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA) Africa 2022 report provides an assessment of the quality of policies and institutions for the calendar year 2021 in all 39 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa that are International Development Association (IDA)–eligible. The overall average score for these countries remained unchanged from the previous year at 3.1. Similarly, no changes were observed at the subregional level, where average scores were unchanged at 3.2 and 3.0 for West and Central Africa and East and Southern Africa, respectively. However, at the country level, the overall CPIA scores changed in 11 countries, including an increase in seven countries and a decline in four. Among the countries that increased their CPIA scores, nearly 70 percent has done it on account of better policies for social inclusion and equity. Among the four countries with decreased CPIA scores, three are assessed with weakened performance in macroeconomic management. Countries with below average scores (under 3.0) are mostly fragile and conflict-affected cases. Section 1 of this report evaluates the impact of the pandemic on economic performance in Sub-Saharan Africa’s IDA-eligible countries, particularly focusing on key macroeconomic outcomes. Section 2 of the report presents the CPIA assessment results by clusters, by criteria, as well as by countries, while distinguishing between fragile and non-fragile countries. Section 3 provides the individual country CPIA pages.
Zimbabwe Country Economic Memorandum: Boosting Productivity and Quality Jobs

(Washington, DC, 2022-10) World Bank

Despite various economic setbacks, Zimbabwe regained lower middle-income country (LMIC) status in 2018 and aspires to become an upper middle-income country (UMIC) by 2030. The focus of this Country Economic Memorandum (CEM) is to identify options for structural reforms to help Zimbabwe accelerate economic growth and to achieve UMIC status. This is the first CEM for Zimbabwe since 1985 and it comes at a critical juncture along Zimbabwe’s development path. The objective of the report is to support and inform policy makers and stakeholders on policies to accelerate economic growth, boost productivity, and create high-quality jobs. In this regard, the CEM first establishes macroeconomic stability as a necessary condition for high and sustained growth. It then uses productivity as an overall framing to identify key structural bottlenecks, before providing deep-dives on informality and trade as priority areas to address in order to unleash productivity growth. Importantly, the report also aims to present data about Zimbabwe’s economic performance in a systematic fashion, focusing on the previous two decades and comparing Zimbabwe with its peers in the region, as well as aspirational peers globally.