Publication: 2003 Annual Review of Development Effectiveness : The Effectiveness of Bank Support for Policy Reform
Loading...
Published
2004
ISSN
Date
2013-08-08
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
The Annual Review of Development Effectiveness (ARDE) 2003, examines the effectiveness of Bank support to borrower countries, in particular, the help to foster reform policies, and institutional frameworks. The Review focuses primarily, although not exclusively, on the years from 1999 through 2003. This is done to facilitate the juxtaposition of recent evaluation evidence with trends in policy indicators. Recent trends in developing countries ' policies suggest that the various dimensions of policy, and institutional performance have, on average, improved modestly, although recent reforms have touched most areas of development policy. In most countries that accomplished strong reform over the period 1999-2003, change was driven by necessity, or opportunities such as transition from socialism, economic crisis, European Union accession, and change of government. Development research suggests that such factors tend to galvanize support for change, and thus make the politics of policy reform easier. Countries whose policies improved over the period 1999-03, grew on average, at more than twice the rate of those that did not. Evaluation evidence links Bank support to recent improvements in policy. At the project level, good country policy ratings tend to be associated with good evaluation ratings on project outcomes. The Bank was less successful in linking its support to policy reform, in countries with no, or weak track records, or with deteriorating policy environments. The uncertainties associated with policy reform are reduced, when the Bank ' s support is aligned with country priorities that have been validated through country-led, inclusive political processes. A start has been made through the Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRSP) process. However, the PRSP ' s potential as a vehicle for fostering country ownership is undermined, according to some borrowing countries, by its role as condition for access to external financial assistance. And, in countries where recent outcomes of Bank assistance were evaluated as satisfactory, high quality, relevant, and timely, Economic and Sector Work (ESW) generally made a substantial contribution. Therefore , it is suggested the Bank should not normally engage in lending, before ESW has established a base of county and sector knowledge.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Operations Evaluation Department. 2004. 2003 Annual Review of Development Effectiveness : The Effectiveness of Bank Support for Policy Reform. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/14925 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 2000 Annual Review of Development Effectiveness : From Strategy to Results(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2001-03)This Annual Review of Development Effectiveness (ARDE) builds on previous reviews, i.e., the 1998 review, released in a hostile environment of financial crisis, concluded that improvements in project performance cannot be enough, that improvements at a higher plane of program, and country performance should also be present; and, the 1999 review, inscribed within the Comprehensive Development Framework dilemmas, and challenges, identified practices for dealing with those challenges, namely to be based on country commitments to poverty reduction, and sustainable growth. The ARDE 2000 finds that progress was solid on a broad front, but that further progress is likely. Portfolio performance is likely to exceed the Strategic Compact target of seventy five percent satisfactory outcomes; and, sustainability, and institutional development ratings reflect improvements. Though progress is commendable, this review examines four tensions the Bank faces: learning to reconcile client, and corporate priorities; adapting global prescriptions to local conditions; balancing country performance and poverty incidence in allocating its resources; and, achieving efficiency/selectivity, seeking to implement a holistic vision of development. Bank strategies should acknowledge client needs, judicious adaptation to institutional, social, and political fronts should be pursued, and, an approach to poor-performing countries should be addressed.Publication Analyzing the Effects of Policy Reforms on the Poor : An Evaluation of the Effectiveness of World Bank Support to Poverty and Social Impact Analyses(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2010)The current global financial and economic crises are likely to put enormous pressure on governments to respond with immediate measures and to undertake far-reaching reforms in the medium term, requiring a substantial increase in donor support. To protect the poor and enhance benefits to them, key policy reforms will need to be underpinned by systematic analysis of their expected poverty and social impacts. The World Bank's experience to date with the Poverty and Social Impact Analysis (PSIA) approach provides useful lessons for addressing these issues. Overall, implementation of the PSIA approach has had considerable limitations. There have been tensions between the various operational objectives assigned to PSIAs. The tensions concern inconsistencies between informing country and Bank policy decisions in a timely way and building country analytic capacity. PSIAs have had limited ownership by Bank staff and managers and have often not been effectively integrated into country assistance programs. Quality assurance, monitoring, and evaluation of the overall effectiveness of PSIAs have been weak. To improve PSIAs' effectiveness, this evaluation recommends that the Bank take measures to ensure that staff fully understands what the PSIA approach is and when to use it, clarify the operational objectives of each PSIA, and ensure that the approach and timeline adopted are aligned with those objectives. Quality assurance mechanisms should be strengthened to ensure that PSIAs are designed to achieve the intended effects.Publication 2004 Annual Review of Development Effectiveness : The World Bank's Contributions to Poverty Reduction(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2005)This 2004 Annual Review of Development Effectiveness (ARDE): The World Bank's Contributions to Poverty Reduction, looks at the growth and poverty reduction experience of client countries. It assesses the extent to which Bank interventions have contributed to growth and poverty reduction and the effectiveness of different types of interventions. The review uses the key elements of the Bank's 2001 poverty reduction strategy to examine the extent to which these elements respond to the needs of the poor, are actually being carried out, and are having an impact. Like previous ARDEs, this review draws primarily on OED's recent evaluation studies, synthesizing and highlighting the findings of these studies around a common theme-in this case, poverty reduction.Publication The Effectiveness of World Bank Support for Community-Based and -Driven Development(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2005)This report analyzes the effectiveness of the World Bank's lending support for the growing area of community-based development (CBD) and community-driven development (CDD). The latter supports the empowerment of the poor by giving communities control over subproject resources and decisions, while CBD gives communities less responsibility and emphasizes collaboration, consultation, or sharing information with them on project activities. Since the late 1990s, the focus of Bank-supported CBD/CDD projects has shifted toward CDD, though many CDD projects also include CBD components.Publication OED Review of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Process : Albania Case Study(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2004-07-06)This report analyzes the experience of Albania with the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) process. The focus of the report is on evaluating the performance of the World Bank in supporting the PRSP initiative, not on appraising the authorities policies. The main emphasis of the report is on the formulation and implementation of the PRSP until March 2003, but it does cover elements of the PRSP Progress Report which was completed following the evaluation team s mission to Albania. The report is structured as follows: Section B describes the country context including, political and economic background, the poverty profile, and key constraints for development. Section C addresses the PRS Process in its entirety and includes an assessment of the relevance of the PRSP for Albania and its consistency with the underlying principles of the initiative. Section D assesses the World Bank s support to the process. Finally, section E summarizes the main points of the assessment and attempts to draw lessons of more general applicability.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Global Economic Prospects, January 2025(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-16)Global growth is expected to hold steady at 2.7 percent in 2025-26. However, the global economy appears to be settling at a low growth rate that will be insufficient to foster sustained economic development—with the possibility of further headwinds from heightened policy uncertainty and adverse trade policy shifts, geopolitical tensions, persistent inflation, and climate-related natural disasters. Against this backdrop, emerging market and developing economies are set to enter the second quarter of the twenty-first century with per capita incomes on a trajectory that implies substantially slower catch-up toward advanced-economy living standards than they previously experienced. Without course corrections, most low-income countries are unlikely to graduate to middle-income status by the middle of the century. Policy action at both global and national levels is needed to foster a more favorable external environment, enhance macroeconomic stability, reduce structural constraints, address the effects of climate change, and thus accelerate long-term growth and development.Publication Recipe for a Livable Planet(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-09-20)The global agrifood system has been largely overlooked in the fight against climate change. Yet, greenhouse gas emissions from the agrifood system are so big that they alone could cause the world to miss the goal of keeping global average temperatures from rising above 1.5 centigrade compared to preindustrial levels. Greenhouse gas emissions from agrifood must be cut to net zero by 2050 to achieve this goal. Recipe for a Livable Planet: Achieving Net Zero Emissions in the Agrifood System offers the first comprehensive global strategic framework to mitigate the agrifood system’s contributions to climate change, detailing affordable and readily available measures that can cut nearly a third of the world’s planet heating emissions while ensuring global food security. These actions, which are urgently needed, offer three additional benefits: improving food supply reliability, strengthening the global food system’s resilience to climate change, and safeguarding vulnerable populations. This practical guide outlines global actions and specific steps that countries at all income levels can take starting now, focusing on six key areas: investments, incentives, information, innovation, institutions, and inclusion. Calling for collaboration among governments, businesses, citizens, and international organizations, it maps a pathway to making agrifood a significant contributor to addressing climate change and healing the planet.Publication El Salvador - Public Expenditure Review : Enhancing the Efficiency and Targeting of Expenditures, Volume 2. Chapters and Statistical Tables(Washington, DC, 2010-11)This Public Expenditure Review (PER), produced jointly by the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), is an in-depth economic and sector report on El Salvador. The study builds on the analysis and recommendations of the PER delivered in 2004 that concluded that El Salvador faced the dual challenge of addressing deteriorating fiscal trends while financing key investments required to accelerate growth and meet pressing social needs. This report is intended to provide the government with practical and useful near-and medium-term recommendations that will support the country's efforts to ensure sustainable fiscal balances and establish effective and transparent mechanisms to allocate public resources to promote broad-based economic growth, improve social indicators, and reduce poverty. Hence, the government knows that El Salvador is faced with two fiscal challenges that will have great influence on the economic performance over the coming years. The first is the need to improve the fiscal balance, by strengthening revenue and reducing expenditure, to ensure medium-term sustainability. The second is the need to finance priority investments required to accelerate growth, reduce unemployment, and cover basic social needs. Meeting both challenges simultaneously will require great skill, given the still fragmented political environment and the difficulties in creating a consensus on future policies. The country needs to strengthen its fiscal stance because not doing so jeopardizes the medium-term macroeconomic framework, and exposes the country to greater vulnerability in the face of external shocks and contingent liabilities.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 World Development Report 2007(World Bank, 2006)The theme of The World Development Report 2007 is youth - young people between the ages of 12 to 24. As this population group seeks identity and independence, they make decisions that affect not only their own well-being, but that of others, and they do this in a rapidly changing demographic and socio-economic environment. Supporting young people's transition to adulthood poses important opportunities and risky challenges for development policy. Are education systems preparing young people to cope with the demands of changing economies? What kind of support do they get as they enter the labor market? Can they move freely to where the jobs are? What can be done to help them avoid serious consequences of risky behavior, such as death from HIV-AIDS and drug abuse? Can their creative energy be directed productively to support development thinking? The report will focus on crucial capabilities and transitions in a young person's life: learning for life and work, staying healthy, working, forming families, and exercising citizenship. For each, there are opportunities and risks; for all, policies and institutions matter.