Publication: Post Covid-19 - Building a Resilient and More Sustainable Recovery in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras: Central America Competitiveness Report
Loading...
Published
2022
ISSN
Date
2022-07-12
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
The Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic has had widespread negative effects in developing countries around the world, generating an unprecedented shock. Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) was a particularly affected region, recording a significant contraction in regional GDP and international trade in 2020. This report focuses on the impact of Covid-19 and recovery in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. These three Central American countries (CA3), albeit unique in their history and characteristics, share many similarities in their economic context and challenges for achieving sustained growth. The region includes one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, with low economic growth rates relative to other Latin American countries.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“World Bank. 2022. Post Covid-19 - Building a Resilient and More Sustainable Recovery in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras: Central America Competitiveness Report. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/37689 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Digital Object Identifier
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication République de Côte d’Ivoire 2021-2030 - Sustaining High, Inclusive, and Resilient Growth Post COVID-19(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-09-23)This report, initiated at the request of His Excellency President Alassane Ouattara to Hafez M. H. Ghanem, the World Bank Group Regional Vice President for Eastern and Southern Africa, is the first country application of the new regional strategy, Supporting Africa’s Transformation. Albert Zeufack, the Chief Economist of the World Bank Group Africa Region, led a team to synthesize knowledge and experience from Côte d’Ivoire and across the world. The report incorporates the perspective of the new International Development Association agenda, Jobs and Economic Transformation, and addresses three operational objectives for Côte d’Ivoire: create sustainable and inclusive growth by maintaining macroeconomic stability, fighting corruption, advancing digital transformation, and maximizing private finance; strengthen human capital by empowering women, reducing child mortality and stunting, and improving education, health, and social protection; build resilience against fragility and climate change. The National Development Plan 2016-20 consolidated promarket reforms and reaffirmed the ambition to reach upper-middle-income status. Côte d’Ivoire is embarking on a strategy to sustain strong gross domestic product (GDP) growth through 2030 while rapidly reducing poverty. Côte d’Ivoire’s aspiration of becoming an emerging market economy with low levels of poverty requires a long period of strong and inclusive growth. The report analyzes growth trajectories and identifies the investments needed to achieve and sustain desired levels of growth, along with the corresponding financing needs. It discusses the opportunities presented by the country’s surplus labor, young population, and huge diversification potential.Publication "Green Stimulus," Economic Recovery, and Long-Term Sustainable Development(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2010-01)This paper discusses short-run and long-run effects of "green stimulus" efforts, and compares these effects with "non-green" fiscal stimuli. Green stimulus is defined here as short-run fiscal stimuli that also serve a "green" or environmental purpose in a situation of "crisis" characterized by temporary under-employment. A number of recently enacted national stimulus packages contain sizeable "green" components. The authors categorize effects according to their a) short-run employment effects, b) long-run growth effects, c) effects on carbon emissions, and d) "co-benefit" effects (on the environment, natural resources, and for other externalities). The most beneficial "green" programs in times of crisis are those that can stimulate employment in the short run, and lead to large "learning curve" effects via lower production costs in the longer term. The overall assessment is that most "green stimulus" programs that have large short-run employment and environmental effects are likely to have less significant positive effects for long-run growth, and vice versa, implying a trade-off in many cases between short-run and long-run impacts. There are also trade-offs for employment generation in that programs that yield larger (smaller) employment effects tend to lead to more employment gains for largely lower-skilled (higher-skilled) workers, so that the long-term growth effects are relatively small (large). Ultimately, the results reinforce the point that different instruments are needed for addressing different problems.Publication Supporting Women Throughout the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Emergency Response and Economic Recovery(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-04)This brief highlight evidence from the Africa gender innovation lab and other promising research on mechanisms that can help protect the lives and livelihoods of women and girls - at the household level, in firms and farms, and during adolescence - in the context of the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic.Publication Agile Treasury Operations During COVID-19(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-04-16)Agile treasury operations are critical and essential to support responses to the spread and treatment of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). In many cases, this approach requires open and new ways of thinking ranging from making cash available to pay for public services, to processing and disbursing payments with minimum bureaucratic layers, to reporting in a timely and accurate manner to ensure transparency. Organized around three core areas of treasury operations, this note provides suggestions and guidance in three action areas: Ensure business continuity for treasury operations. Operationalize emergency arrangements. Manage the post-pandemic environment – recovery, reconstruction, and resilience.Publication Damage, Loss, and Needs Assessment Guidance Notes : Volume 3. Estimation of Post-Disaster Needs for Recovery and Reconstruction(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2010)This is a guideline for World Bank task team leaders (TTLs) entrusted with the design and execution of assessments to determine disaster impacts as well as post-disaster needs for recovery, reconstruction, and disaster risk reduction or management. Assessments estimate, first, the short-term government interventions required to initiate recovery and second, the financial requirements to achieve overall post-disaster recovery, reconstruction, and disaster risk management or reduction. The end product of the assessment is a comprehensive program of recovery, reconstruction, and risk management that will guide all actions in a developing country following a disaster. The damage and loss assessment (DaLA) methodology uses objective, quantitative information on the value of destroyed assets and temporary production losses to estimate, first, government interventions for the short term and second, post-disaster financing needs. The DaLA method ensures that the affected government, the United Nations and other international and domestic agencies jointly develop properly estimated and prioritized financial requirements and an accompanying formula that identifies all possible financial sources and modalities. In addition, the estimation of the needs can be used as a basis to monitor post-disaster recovery and reconstruction progress. The DaLA aim at operationalizing the concepts for practitioners at government agencies, the World Bank, and other national and international organizations, responsible for assessing the impact of disasters, and for developing recovery and reconstruction plans. The guidance notes comprises of three volumes: (i) guideline for TTL in the design and execution of a damage, loss, and needs assessment, (ii) conducting damage and loss assessments after disasters, and (iii) estimation of post-disaster needs for recovery and reconstruction.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Digital Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-03-13)All African countries need better and more jobs for their growing populations. "Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs" shows that broader use of productivity-enhancing, digital technologies by enterprises and households is imperative to generate such jobs, including for lower-skilled people. At the same time, it can support not only countries’ short-term objective of postpandemic economic recovery but also their vision of economic transformation with more inclusive growth. These outcomes are not automatic, however. Mobile internet availability has increased throughout the continent in recent years, but Africa’s uptake gap is the highest in the world. Areas with at least 3G mobile internet service now cover 84 percent of Africa’s population, but only 22 percent uses such services. And the average African business lags in the use of smartphones and computers as well as more sophisticated digital technologies that catalyze further productivity gains. Two issues explain the usage gap: affordability of these new technologies and willingness to use them. For the 40 percent of Africans below the extreme poverty line, mobile data plans alone would cost one-third of their incomes—in addition to the price of access devices, apps, and electricity. Data plans for small- and medium-size businesses are also more expensive than in other regions. Moreover, shortcomings in the quality of internet services—and in the supply of attractive, skills-appropriate apps that promote entrepreneurship and raise earnings—dampen people’s willingness to use them. For those countries already using these technologies, the development payoffs are significant. New empirical studies for this report add to the rapidly growing evidence that mobile internet availability directly raises enterprise productivity, increases jobs, and reduces poverty throughout Africa. To realize these and other benefits more widely, Africa’s countries must implement complementary and mutually reinforcing policies to strengthen both consumers’ ability to pay and willingness to use digital technologies. These interventions must prioritize productive use to generate large numbers of inclusive jobs in a region poised to benefit from a massive, youthful workforce—one projected to become the world’s largest by the end of this century.Publication Aid and Trust in Country Systems(2009-07-01)The 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness sets targets for increased use by donors of recipient country systems for managing aid. A consensus view holds that country systems are strengthened when donors trust recipients to manage aid funds, but undermined when donors manage aid through their own separate parallel systems. This paper provides an analytical framework for understanding donors decisions to trust in country systems or instead to micro-manage aid using their own systems and procedures. Where country systems are sufficiently weak, the development impact of aid is reduced by donors reliance on them. Trust in country systems will be sub-optimal, however, if donors have multiple objectives in aid provision rather than a sole objective of maximizing development outcomes. Empirical tests are conducted using data from an OECD survey designed to monitor progress toward Paris Declaration goals. Trust in country systems is measured in three ways: use of the recipient s public financial management systems, use of direct budget support, and use of program-based approaches. The authors show using fixed effects regression that a donor s trust in recipient country systems is positively related to (1) trustworthiness or quality of those systems, (2) tolerance for risk on the part of the donor s constituents, as measured by public support for providing aid, and (3) the donor s ability to internalize more of the benefits of investing in country systems, as measured by the donor s share of all aid provided to a recipient.Publication Vietnam(World Bank, Hanoi, 2020-05-01)Following from Vietnam’s ratification of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) in late 2018 and its effectiveness from January 2019, and the European Parliament’s recent approval of the European Union-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA) and its subsequent planned ratification by the National Assembly in May 2020, Vietnam has further demonstrated its determination to be a modern, competitive, open economy. As the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) crisis has clearly shown, diversified markets and supply chains will be key in the future global context to managing the risk of disruptions in trade and in supply chains due to changing trade relationships, climate change, natural disasters, and disease outbreaks. In those regards, Vietnam is in a stronger position than most countries in the region. The benefits of globalization are increasingly being debated and questioned. However, in the case of Vietnam, the benefits have been clear in terms of high and consistent economic growth and a large reduction in poverty levels. As Vietnam moves to ratify and implement a new generation of free trade agreements (FTAs), such as the CPTPP and EVFTA, it is important to clearly demonstrate, in a transparent manner, the economic gains and distributional impacts (such as sectoral and poverty) from joining these FTAs. In the meantime, it is crucial to highlight the legal gaps that must be addressed to ensure that national laws and regulations are in compliance with Vietnam’s obligations under these FTAs. Readiness to implement this new generation of FTAs at both the national and subnational level is important to ensure that the country maximizes the full economic benefits in terms of trade and investment. This report explores the issues of globalization and the integration of Vietnam into the global economy, particularly through implementation of the EVFTA.Publication De-Risking and Other Challenges in the Emerging Market Financial Sector(International Finance Corporation, Washington, D.C., 2017-09-01)This paper examines the relationship between increasing compliance costs and correspondent bank de-risking, among other challenges, and the ability of private-sector banks in emerging markets to continue providing international banking services to their customers. The IFC Financial Institutions Group, which provides investment and advisory services to banks, microfinance institutions, mortgage and insurance companies, and other financial services providers in emerging markets, has built a global network of hundreds of clients in more than one hundred countries who rely on cross-border banking to serve the needs of their customers and, through their customers, their countries. This paper seeks to enlighten the public discourse on de-risking by sharing insights gleaned from the perspectives of IFC’s network of global emerging market financial institution clients. In this discussion, the authors present the results of the 2017 Correspondent Banking in Emerging Markets survey, undertaken by IFC to capture both data and information from IFC client banks in ninety two emerging markets.Publication Fiscal Policy, Stabilization, and Growth : Prudence or Abstinence(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2008)This volume covers the conduct of fiscal policy in Latin America, and its consequences for macroeconomic stability and long-term growth. The volume's chapters examine different aspects of these problems, ranging from the purely economic to the institutional and political economy dimensions. The book is organized as follows. This chapter offers an integrated overview of the themes covered in the rest of the volume. The chapter guides the reader through the rest of the volume, but it has been written as a self-standing essay for the benefit of those readers who may not have the time to indulge in the details of every chapter. The rest of the volume is organized in two parts. The first part deals with the pro-cyclical bias of fiscal policy, and the second part with the anti-investment bias of fiscal discipline -- popularly (albeit somewhat confusingly) known as the fiscal space problem. The rest of this introductory chapter consists of four sections. Section II examines recent trends in fiscal policy in the region and introduces the two main themes of the book. Sections III and IV present an overview of the topics covered in the two parts of the book, as well as the conclusions of the corresponding chapters. Section V summarizes the implications for future fiscal analysis and policy management.