Corporate Flagships

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The current corporate publications that are World Bank Group flagships are: World Development Report (WDR); Global Economic Prospects (GEP), Doing Business (DB), and Poverty and Shared Prosperity (PSP). All go through a formal Bank-wide review and are discussed with the Board prior to their release. In terms of branding, the phrase “A World Bank Group Flagship Report” will be used exclusively on the cover of these publications. This label will signal that the institution assumes a higher level of responsibility for the positions held by these reports. The flagship Global Monitoring Report (GMR) is no longer produced. The flagship Doing Business is no longer produced.

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    World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development
    (World Bank, 2012) World Bank
    The main message of this year's World development report: gender equality and development is that these patterns of progress and persistence in gender equality matter, both for development outcomes and policy making. They matter because gender equality is a core development objective in its own right. But greater gender equality is also smart economics, enhancing productivity and improving other development outcomes, including prospects for the next generation and for the quality of societal policies and institutions. Economic development is not enough to shrink all gender disparities-corrective policies that focus on persisting gender gaps are essential. This report points to four priority areas for policy going forward. First, reducing gender gaps in human capital-specifically those that address female mortality and education. Second, closing gender gaps in access to economic opportunities, earnings, and productivity. Third, shrinking gender differences in voice and agency within society. Fourth, limiting the reproduction of gender inequality across generations. These are all areas where higher incomes by themselves do little to reduce gender gaps, but focused policies can have a real impact. Gender equality is at the heart of development. It's the right development objective, and it's smart economic policy. The World development report 2012 can help both countries and international partners think through and integrate a focus on gender equality into development policy making and programming.
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    World Development Report 2011: Conflict, Security, and Development
    (World Bank, 2011) World Bank
    The 2011 World development report looks across disciplines and experiences drawn from around the world to offer some ideas and practical recommendations on how to move beyond conflict and fragility and secure development. The key messages are important for all countries-low, middle, and high income-as well as for regional and global institutions: first, institutional legitimacy is the key to stability. When state institutions do not adequately protect citizens, guard against corruption, or provide access to justice; when markets do not provide job opportunities; or when communities have lost social cohesion-the likelihood of violent conflict increases. Second, investing in citizen security, justice, and jobs is essential to reducing violence. But there are major structural gaps in our collective capabilities to support these areas. Third, confronting this challenge effectively means that institutions need to change. International agencies and partners from other countries must adapt procedures so they can respond with agility and speed, a longer-term perspective, and greater staying power. Fourth, need to adopt a layered approach. Some problems can be addressed at the country level, but others need to be addressed at a regional level, such as developing markets that integrate insecure areas and pooling resources for building capacity Fifth, in adopting these approaches, need to be aware that the global landscape is changing. Regional institutions and middle income countries are playing a larger role. This means should pay more attention to south-south and south-north exchanges, and to the recent transition experiences of middle income countries.
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    Doing Business 2011 : Making a Difference for Entrepreneurs - Comparing Business Regulation in 183 Economies
    (World Bank, 2010) International Finance Corporation ; World Bank
    Doing Business 2011: making a difference for entrepreneurs is the eighth in a series of annual reports investigating regulations that enhance business activity and those that constrain it. Doing Business presents quantitative indicators on business regulations and the protection of property rights that can be compared across 183 economies, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, over time. A set of regulations affecting 11 areas of the life of a business's are covered: starting a business, dealing with construction permits, registering property, getting credit, protecting investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts and closing a business. Data in Doing Business 2011 are current as of June 1, 2010. The indicators are used to analyze economic outcomes and identify what reforms have worked, where, and why. The paper includes the following headings: overview, starting a business, dealing with construction permits, employing workers, registering property, getting credit, protecting investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts, and closing a business.
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    World Development Report 2010: Development and Climate Change
    (Washington, DC, 2010) World Bank
    Thirty years ago, half the developing world lived in extreme poverty today, a quarter. Now, a much smaller share of children are malnourished and at risk of early death. And access to modern infrastructure is much more widespread. Critical to the progress: rapid economic growth driven by technological innovation and institutional reform, particularly in today's middle- income countries, where per capita incomes have doubled. Yet the needs remain enormous, with the number of hungry people having passed the billion marks this year for the first time in history. With so many still in poverty and hunger, growth and poverty alleviation remain the overarching priority for developing countries. Climate change only makes the challenge more complicated. First, the impacts of a changing climate are already being felt, with more droughts, more floods, more strong storms, and more heat waves-taxing individuals, firms, and governments, drawing resources away from development. Second, continuing climate change, at current rates, will pose increasingly severe challenges to development. By century's end, it could lead to warming of 5°C or more compared with preindustrial times and to a vastly different world from today, with more extreme weather events, most ecosystems stressed and changing, many species doomed to extinction, and whole island nations threatened by inundation. Even our best efforts are unlikely to stabilize temperatures at anything less than 2°C above preindustrial temperatures, warming that will require substantial adaptation. High income countries can and must reduce their carbon footprints. They cannot continue to fill up an unfair and unsustainable share of the atmospheric commons. But developing countries whose average per capita emissions are a third those of high income countries need massive expansions in energy, transport, urban systems, and agricultural production. If pursued using traditional technologies and carbon intensities, these much-needed expansions will produce more greenhouse gases and, hence, more climate change. The question, then, is not just how to make development more resilient to climate change. It is how to pursue growth and prosperity without causing "dangerous" climate change.
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    Global Economic Prospects, January 2010: Crisis, Finance, and Growth
    (World Bank, 2010) World Bank
    The world economy is emerging from the throes of a historically deep and synchronized recession provoked by the bursting of a global financial bubble. The consequences of the initial bubble and the crisis have been felt in virtually every economy, whether or not it participated directly in the risky behaviors that precipitated the boom-and-bust cycle. And while growth rates have picked up, the depth of the recession means that it will take years before unemployment and spare capacity are reabsorbed. This year's global economic prospects examines the consequences of the crisis for both the short and medium term growth prospects of developing countries. It concludes that the crisis and the regulatory reaction to the financial excesses of the preceding several years may have lasting impacts on financial markets, raising borrowing costs and lowering levels of credit and international capital flows. As a result, the rate of growth of potential output in developing countries may be reduced by between 0.2 and 0.7 percentage points annually over the next five to seven years as economies adjust to tighter financial conditions. Overall, the level of potential output in developing countries could be reduced by between 3.4 and 8 percent over the long run, compared with its pre-crisis path. The report further finds that the very liquid conditions of the first half of the decade contributed to the expansion in credit available in developing countries and that this expansion was responsible for about 40 percent of the approximately 1.5 percentage point acceleration of the pace at which many developing-country economies could grow without generating significant inflation. While developing countries probably cannot reverse the expected tightening in international financial conditions, there is considerable scope for reducing domestic borrowing costs, or increasing productivity and thereby regaining the higher growth path that the crisis has derailed.