Sector/Thematic Studies

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http://hdl.handle.net/10986/2110

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. This set includes the sectoral and thematic studies which are not Core Diagnostic Studies. Other analytic and advisory activities (AAA), including technical assistance studies, are included in these sectoral/thematic collections.

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Delivering Digital G2P Payments to Urban Informal Populations: Lessons and Future Policy Implications from COVID-19 Responses

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-10-03) Ubah, Ubah Thomas ; Mukherjee, Anit ; Webster, Brian ; Cunningham, Wendy ; Marin, Georgina

The COVID-19 response in many Sub-Saharan African countries included the rapid deployment of social protection programs leveraging digital systems to counteract the income losses that were disproportionately experienced by urban informal populations. Using data from three in-depth country case studies, this paper finds that these digital government-to-person (G2P) payments contributed to countries reaching beneficiaries quickly and safely and that G2P payments may be particularly viable in urban, as compared to rural, areas due to greater access to digital and financial infrastructure, creative use of big data, and population density that allows for mass communication. However, there are still pockets of exclusion in urban areas emerging from incomplete digital access, limited financial inclusion, underdeveloped financial ecosystems, and high population mobility. It is particularly challenging to identify, communicate with, assess, and deliver G2P services to informal workers in urban areas due to their non-registration status, variable income flows, the blending of the home and household enterprises into a single entity, and the governments’ limited experience in identifying eligible beneficiaries within this segment. While adopting a digital G2P architecture provides a promising avenue to strengthen the safety nets for this segment in the region, exclusion challenges remain. Given the ubiquity of urban informality in the region, countries will need to work to include the urban informal in foundational digital systems, such as national IDs and social registries, adopt flexible regulatory and hybrid delivery models to address the sector’s varied needs, and seek to foster robust digital payment ecosystems to maximize the potential for spillover benefits.
Togo Jobs Diagnostic: Confronting Challenges and Creating Opportunities for More Good Quality Jobs for All

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-08-04) Karlen, Raphaela ; Rother, Friederike ; editors

Togo, a small country with a young and growing population, must look to the development of more and better jobs to recover from recent shocks, accelerate poverty reduction and enhance social cohesion. While Togo’s employment rate is high, many are working low productive jobs with meager earnings and no access to social protection. Demographic pressures imply that Togo’s economy will need to absorb an additional one million labor market entrants between now and 2030. To create more, and better jobs, especially for young workers, substantive reforms are required to accelerate a structural transformation towards higher productivity activities. Besides improving the competitiveness of and access to finance for the private sector, improving conditions in the agricultural sector needs to be at the core of these reforms, as that sector will remain the main source of jobs and livelihoods for Togolese in the foreseeable future.
Pacific Economic Update, August 2023: Recovering in the Midst of Uncertainty - Special Focus : Harnessing the Benefits of Pacific Migration

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-08-03) World Bank

The global economic recovery remains fragile, creating choppy seas for the recovering Pacific. While global conditions have gradually improved since the pandemic and spillovers from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, progress on reducing inflation in major economies has proven more challenging than expected. Given that all Pacific countries are net importers, this has resulted in persistently high imported inflation. The speed of monetary policy tightening by major central banks has slowed, but easing is unlikely in the near term. Aggregate demand in major trading partners of the Pacific (particularly Australia and New Zealand) remains lackluster. This could limit demand for travel and tourism services and other income sources such as remittance and commodity exports. Despite uncertainties in the global economic recovery, Pacific economies are expected to see ongoing expansion in 2023 and 2024. Fiji led the Pacific’s post-COVID-19 recovery with open borders and a strong rebound in 2022 and is now on track to reach its pre-pandemic output level in 2023. Ongoing recovery expectations in the Pacific are broadly in line with March 2023 World Bank projections except for Tuvalu and Palau, where growth has been revised down given weaker than expected outcomes in construction and tourism. In 2023, Pacific growth is expected to reach 3.9 percent and then moderate to 3.3 percent in 2024 as the initial post-COVID-19 rebound dissipates and the region moves towards its long-term trend growth of 2.6 percent. Nonetheless, uncertainty remains high and depends on whether a soft landing can be achieved among key trading partners as they battle ongoing inflation. Inflation remained stubborn across the Pacific at an average of over 6.7 percent in 2022, a substantial increase from the 1.5 percent average during 2019-2021. This has increased the risk of vulnerable populations falling into poverty. In line with global trends, Pacific inflation is expected to decline to an average of 6.0 percent in 2023 and gradually subside thereafter.
Realizing Education's Promise: A World Bank Retrospective

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-08-01) World Bank

As the largest external financier of education in low- and middle-income countries, the World Bank is committed to ensuring that all children around the world have free, inclusive, equitable, and quality education to achieve their potential. Our portfolio of investments in education has continued to grow, and our projects focus on ensuring that high-quality learning takes place for everyone, everywhere. In “Realizing Education’s Promise: A World Bank Retrospective”, we explore our operations and research across the globe since the first World Development Report (WDR) on education in 2018, which illuminated the scale of the learning crisis. In this new publication, we spotlight major milestones in our work over the past five years, highlighting successes, reflecting on what remains to be done, and sharing our vision for the way forward.
Liberia Economic Update, June 2023: Getting Rice Right for Productivity and Poverty Alleviation

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-07-28) World Bank

In the last two years, Liberia’s economic performance has improved. Inflation remained in single digits despite high global food and fuel prices and a relaxation in monetary and fiscal policies. Liberia’s poverty rate is projected to have declined slightly in the last two years as GDP growth rebounds and inflation moderates. On the external side, Liberia’s current account balance improved in 2022, thanks to the continued increase in mining export earnings. The increase in gold export in 2022 offset the increase in imports. Liberia’s medium-term economic outlook is positive, but uncertainties remain. Even as it has been trying to recover from a decade of weak economic and social performance, Liberia’s overall productivity and economic efficiency remain low, especially in vital sectors of the economy, including agriculture. Demographic trends, economic growth, and a strong preference for rice are the main drivers of demand. Yet, Liberia produces only one-third of its rice needs due to several constraints, including limited access to technology, inefficient farming practices, low public and private investments, and a fragmented value chain, among other factors that have kept productivity low. Amid low production, the increase in imported rice prices continues to fuel food insecurity, poverty, and vulnerabilities in Liberia. Domestic production would need to triple to satisfy local demand, but increasing production would require significant investments in the rice sector, as well as policy actions. This report provides some broad directions for policies.
An Operational Approach to Enhancing Women’s and Girls’ Empowerment in World Bank Projects

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-07-28) World Bank

Gender equality has long been central to the World Bank’s twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity in a sustainable manner. More recently, women’s and girls’ empowerment (WGE) has become a priority in the Africa region in the context of the region’s demographic transition. There has been a proliferation of World Bank projects with development objectives that include “empowerment”, yet there remains a lack of consensus around its definition and operationalization. This note lays out a pragmatic Operational Approach to enhancing women’s and girls’ empowerment in World Bank projects. It is not intended to provide a new definition of empowerment or to present a new framework. Instead, the objective of the note is to translate widely accepted empowerment concepts into an operational approach to WGE that Bank Task Team Leaders (TTLs) can use in their project and ASA work. The approach includes: (i) a systematic way to analyze constraints to achieving WGE in the context of lending or analytical products; (ii) a list of potential intervention areas within the three empowerment pillars that can be integrated into World Bank projects; and (iii) guidance on how to incorporate the operational approach to WGE into project design.
How to Design a Grievance Mechanism that Responds to Gender-Based Violence? Learning from South Sudan

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-07-28) Rawal, Palak

The grievance mechanism is based on a survivor-centric approach i.e., empowering the survivor of gender-based violence by prioritizing their rights, needs, and wishes. This note provides an overview of the grievance mechanism’s setup and details for teams who may be considering implementing a similar mechanism in their projects.
Seventh Ghana Economic Update: Price Surge - Unraveling Inflation’s Toll on Poverty and Food Security

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-07-24) Kwakye, Kwabena Gyan ; Corral Rodas, Paul Andres ; Elmaleh, David ; Sebastian, Ashwini Rekha

Ghana’s economy entered a full-blown crisis in 2022, after having rebounded from the COVID-19 slowdown in 2021. In response to the macroeconomic challenges, the authorities enacted some fiscal adjustment in 2022 but fell short of their consolidation targets; the 2023Q1 fiscal deficit (cash) was within target. Expenditure consolidation and revenue mobilization continued to be hampered by structural constraints. To address these unsustainable domestic and external imbalances, the authorities embarked on a comprehensive debt restructuring operation. Against the backdrop, growth is projected to decelerate further in 2023-24, before picking up in the medium-term. The government has embarked on an ambitious fiscal consolidation plan: however, delivering on it will require addressing long-standing revenue mobilization and budget control weaknesses. In 2023, the authorities intend to finance the fiscal deficit from multilateral (and other official) sources, in the context of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) - supported program, and from the domestic treasury bills (T-bills) market. In addition, leveraging government programs to build up resilience against vulnerability is an imperative and should not be suspended during the crisis. Beefing up the government’s payments through the livelihood empowerment against poverty will be critical. Second, support for food self-sufficiency is needed in Ghana (a goal for many countries now due to the global food crisis), while opening the country to generate more export revenues. The Ghana Tree Crops Diversification Project can serve as a critical puzzle piece of the country’s current challenges. The project will support poverty alleviation while setting the country up to generate more foreign revenues in the medium to long-term.
Climate and Equity: A Framework to Guide Policy Action

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-07-06) Brunckhorst, Ben ; Hill, Ruth ; Mansuri, Ghazala ; Nguyen, Trang ; Doan, Miki

Reducing the impact of climate change on poor and vulnerable households is essential to hastening poverty reduction. In thinking about policies that do this, it is useful to apply the same hazard, exposure and vulnerability framework that is often used to understand the physical impacts of climate change and add the non-climate benefits and costs to households that these policies can also bring. Policies that reduce hazards and vulnerability whilst bringing non-climate benefits—triple win policies—are not very common, but where possible they should be prioritized. Policies that reduce vulnerability and bring non-climate benefits are more common. However, some development policies that bring non-climate benefits, particularly in higher-income and higher-growth countries, may increase emissions by enough to worsen future hazards, so their emissions impact needs to be managed with compensating actions. Policies that reduce the hazards faced by poor households are needed, and the non-climate cost of these policies on poor people should be minimized or compensated where it cannot be avoided.
Gender-Based Violence Country Profile: Guatemala

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-06-01) World Bank

With a population of approximately 18.2 million people, Guatemala is the most populous country in Central America. Guatemala has one of the highest rates of femicide in the world, with violent deaths of women increasing from 1.3 per 100,000 women in 2020 to 1.6 per 100,000 women in 2021, resulting in 527 femicides reported in 2021 and 534 in 2022, and 69 femicides reported by March 2023. High-risk groups facing multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination include young and adolescent girls, indigenous women, those who have experienced adolescent pregnancies, early unions or marriages, women and girls living with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ groups. In order to address violence and discrimination against women and girls in Guatemala, various initiatives and policies have been implemented by the government and civil society organizations. However, much work remains to be done to effectively address the root causes of these issues and ensure the safety and wellbeing of all women and girls in the country.