Publication: The World Bank's Involvement in Global and Regional Partnership Programs : An Independent Assessment
Loading...
Published
2011
ISSN
Date
2015-01-22
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
Programs with regional or global reach are increasingly being used to channel funds to specific development needs, reflecting the emergence of new funding sources and in some cases donor distrust of the established multilateral development model to deliver global goods. Evaluating the contribution of these programs is important to understanding whether their relevance and effectiveness live up to their promise and how they contribute to the new aid architecture. This is third biennial report of the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) on the World Bankapos;s involvement in global and regional partnership programs (GRPPs) since the conclusion of IEGapos;s two-phase evaluation on this topic in 2004. The first two biennial reports were discussed at the committee on development effectiveness subcommittee in May 2006 and March 2008. The present report is the first one that will be disclosed to the public reflecting the growing maturity of this line of IEG's work. This report has been based on the first 17 GPRs that IEG has completed and on interviews with Bank staff who have been involved in the management and oversight of GRPPs in central, network, and regional Vice Presidencies. IEG greatly appreciates the time and insights provided by those interviewed for this report, including network and regional staff who confirmed the accuracy of the basic information provided in the appendixes to this report on the nearly 120 GRPPs with which the Bank is currently involved. The objectives of the 17 programs that IEG has reviewed in depth since 2006 have been highly relevant in terms of collectively addressing important global and regional issues, but few have had a well-articulated results framework. Almost all programs can point to some positive achievements in terms of outputs. However, the sustainability of a number of programs and the benefits they foster is threatened by weak resource mobilization strategies, failure to keep up with the changing global and regional context, and difficulties in demonstrating results at the outcome level.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Independent Evaluation Group. 2011. The World Bank's Involvement in Global and Regional Partnership Programs : An Independent Assessment. © http://hdl.handle.net/10986/21342 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication World Bank Progress in Harmonization and Alignment in Low-Income Countries(Washington, DC: World Bank Group, 2011)A series of global initiatives have been launched over the last decade by the international community to accelerate progress toward meeting the Millennium Development Goals. These initiatives entailed commitments to provide more aid and efforts to strengthen aid effectiveness. They culminated in the Paris Declaration of 2005, which formalized five principles of aid effectiveness. This evaluation addresses Bank efforts in advancing two of the Paris Declaration principles harmonization and alignment (H and A). These are the key tenets of donor coordination falling primarily under the responsibility of donors (including the Bank) and have been considered central to strengthening aid effectiveness. This evaluation comes on the run-up to the fourth high-level forum on aid effectiveness, which will be held in Busan, Korea, at the end of November. By focusing on the World Bank's effectiveness in donor H and A and identifying steps to improve the Bank's effectiveness, this work complements the evaluation of the implementation of the Paris declaration at the country level that was recently completed under the auspices of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Finally, Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) derives findings on the factors that are important for promoting H and A. The evaluation does not address the impact of H and A on development outcomes a causal assumption of the Paris declaration because of the great problems of attribution.Publication Poverty Reduction Support Credits : An Evaluation of World Bank Support(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2010)The goal of Poverty Reduction Support Credits (PRSCs), introduced in early 2001 under World Bank Interim guidelines, was to help countries implement comprehensive, country-owned development strategies to promote growth, improve social conditions, and reduce poverty. PRSCs were intended to ease conditionality and to make annual flows to recipient countries predictable and integrated with their budgets. To reduce fiduciary risks associated with budget support, PRSCs were intended to strengthen domestic budget processes. They were seen as providing a framework for donor harmonization and were meant to focus on achieving clearly defined results.Publication IEG Annual Report 2011 : Results and Performance of the World Bank Group(Washington, DC: World Bank Group, 2011)The work of the World Bank Group (WBG) in helping reduce poverty supports four core goals at both global and country levels: expanding economic opportunities, enhancing human development, mitigating socioeconomic and environmental risks, and improving governance and public sector effectiveness. In the first half of the 2000s, developing countries made advances in these areas, leading to a significant reduction in poverty. Historically high economic growth rates as well as improvements in key aspects of human development made the difference. A series of global economic crises as well as natural disasters contributed to setbacks, while global climate change continued to threaten progress. These global shifters need to be confronted by development strategies. Improving governance and public sector effectiveness is key to reducing poverty further. The quality of public sector management also affects the WBGapos;s development effectiveness in countries. WBG-supported country program and project outcomes are lower in countries with poorer quality public sector management, suggesting a need to augment the approach and prioritize engagement in this area. Finally, WBG managementapos;s adoption of recommendations derived from evaluations has increased over time, and both management and Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) have agreed on measures to improve this process.Publication World Bank Group Assistance to Low-Income Fragile and Conflict-Affected States : An Independent Evaluation(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-01)Fragile and conflict-affected states (FCS) have become an important focus of World Bank Group assistance in recent years as recognition of the linkages between fragility, conflict, violence, and poverty has grown. Addressing issues of recurring conflict and political violence and helping build legitimate and accountable state institutions are central to the Bank Group's poverty reduction mission. This evaluation assesses the relevance and effectiveness of World Bank Group country strategies and assistance programs to FCS. The operationalization of the World Development Report 2011: Conflict, Security, and Development (2011 WDR) is also assessed, to see how the framework has been reflected in subsequent analytical work, country assistance strategies, and the assistance programs. The evaluation framework was derived from the concepts and priorities articulated in recent WDRs, policy papers, and progress reports issued by Bank Group management, to draw lessons from FCS. The framework is organized around the three major themes emerging from the 2011 WDR: building state capacity, building capacity of citizens, and promoting inclusive growth and jobs. The evaluation focuses on International Development Association (IDA)-only countries, which are deemed to have certain characteristics such as very low average income and no access to private finance, making them eligible for special finance tools and programs. As the benchmark for measuring results, Bank Group performance is evaluated in 33 fragile and conflict-affected states against that of 31 IDA-only countries that have never been on the FCS list. Six new country case studies; analyses of Bank Group portfolios; human resources and budget data; secondary analysis of IEG evaluations; background studies including those on aid flows, gender, private sector development, and jobs; and surveys of Bank Group staffs and stakeholders are also included in the evaluation.Publication A Guide to the World Bank(Washington, DC, 2003)This book is intended for the wide range of people around the world who need basic information about the work of the Bank Group. This audience includes people working in all aspects of development, students, members of the general public, and staff members of the Bank Group itself. Because this audience is so broad, the text emphasizes the organizational and conceptual divisions of the Bank Group's activities and guides readers to potential sources of more-detailed explanations of the development work in progress. The annual reports of the Bank Group institutions provide more details on the volume and types of development assistance. The annual World Bank Group Directory lists telephone contacts for individuals and departments. The following chapters explain how the World Bank Group is organized; how it operates; and how its work focuses on countries, regions, and specific topics in development. Appendixes provide further information on Bank Group contacts, on the organization's history, on country membership and the voting shares in the institutions, on the sector and thematic categories for the Bank Group's activities, and on Bank Group resources in individual countries.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Economic Governance Improvements and Sovereign Financing Costs in Developing Countries(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-05)Low- and middle-income country governments are increasingly tapping the global debt capital markets. This is increasing the amount of finance available for development, but at a considerably higher cost than traditional external borrowing on concessional terms. Using a novel methodology based on estimating sovereign credit ratings using the Moody’s scorecard, and examining the associations between these ratings and the World Bank’s Country Policy and Institutional Assessment scores, this paper examines how making improvements in the quality of economic policies and institutions can help lower governments’ financing costs. This method aims to overcome the small-sample problem due to the number of rated developing country sovereigns still being relatively limited (although growing). Better economic governance Country Policy and Institutional Assessment scores are associated with better estimated ratings and materially lower financing costs; on average, improvements that are sufficient to increase the Country Policy and Institutional Assessment economic governance indicator score by one point are associated with interest costs that are lower by about 40 basis points, even setting aside the direct impact on ratings of better governance indicators. There are many reasons why improving governance is a good thing. Among them is the potential payoff to the public purse — savings of $40 million or more on a standard $1 billion, 10-year bond.Publication Statistical Performance Indicators and Index(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-03)The World Bank’s Statistical Capacity Index has been widely employed to measure country statistical capacity since its inception two decades ago. This paper builds on the existing advantages of the Statistical Capacity Index, conceptually and empirically, to offer new statistical performance indicators and the Statistical Performance Index, which can better measure a country’s statistical performance. The new index has clearer conceptual motivations, employs a stronger mathematical foundation, and significantly expands the number of indicators and countries covered. The paper further provides empirical evidence that illustrates the strong correlation of the new index with other commonly used development indicators of human capital, governance, poverty, and inequality. The framework can accommodate future directions to improve the index as the global data landscape evolvesPublication Evolution of the World Bank’s Thinking on Governance(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-01)The preparation work for the 2017 World Development Report on Governance and the Law in 2016 will coincide with the 25th anniversary of the World Bank’s decision to broaden its ongoing work on public sector management to embrace key issues of governance in the Bank’s borrowing countries. This paper provides a broad overview of the major Bank reports on governance that went through a review process at a sufficiently high level in the institution that they can reasonably be described as reflecting the Bank’s considered views at the time on the subject. The objective is to review the evolution of the Bank’s thinking on governance and assess the relevance and effectiveness of the work and its implications for the forthcoming World Development Report. Section two of this paper begins with a brief account of how the Bank came to focus on issues of governance, reviewing the major upheaval of governance in many of the Bank’s borrowing countries in the 1980s, the legal constraints the Articles of Agreement impose on the Bank’s work on governance, and a brief overview of the Bank’s initial policy statement on governance issued to the Bank’s Board in June 1991. Section three reviews major Bank work on governance as reflected in successive World Development Reports and examines the Bank’s analysis of the issue of corruption, reviewing how the Bank’s thinking on this symptom of poor governance has evolved. Section four steps back to assess what the Bank got right and some of the issues it missed or failed to address adequately. Section five draws attention to the dramatic changes experienced by the developing world in these past 25 years, and points to the need to better understand the implications of these changes for the governance context facing developing countries.Publication Governance in Sub-Saharan Africa in the 21st Century(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-03-04)What can be learned from the governance trajectory of African countries since the beginning of the 21st century What is the quality of governance on the African continent and how does it shape development The first decade of the millennium saw promising growth and poverty reduction in much of the continent. Yet, Sub-Saharan Africa has also been the stage of a stream of governance reform failures and policy reversals, and many countries continue to suffer from the consequences of poor governance. This paper explores the dynamics of governance reform on the continent over the past two decades and points to four key trends. First, effective state institutions, capable of maintaining peace, fostering growth, and delivering services, have developed unevenly. Second, progress has been made on enhancing the inclusiveness and accountability of institutions, but it remains constrained by the weakness of checks and balances and the persistence of patterns of centralized and exclusive power arrangements. Third, civic capacity has risen considerably, but the inability of institutions to respond to social expectations and political mobilization threatens to turn liberal civic engagement into distrust, populism, and radicalization. Fourth, the combination of these three trends contributes to the rise of political instability, which constitutes a major threat for the continent.Publication Data Transparency and Growth in Developing Economies during and after the Global Financial Crisis(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-12)The study explores the effects of data transparency on economic growth for developing economies over a unique time period—at the onset of the 2007–2009 global financial crisis and thereafter. Data transparency is defined as the timely production of credible statistics as measured by the Statistical Capacity Indicator. The paper finds that data transparency has a positive effect on real gross domestic product per capita during a period of considerable uncertainty. The estimates indicate an elasticity of the magnitude of 0.03 percent per year, which is much larger than the elasticity of trade openness and schooling in the estimation sample. The empirics employ a variety of econometric estimators, including dynamic panel and cross-sectional instrumental variables estimators, with the latter approach yielding a higher estimated elasticity. The findings are robust to the inclusion of several factors in addition to political institutions and exogenous commodity-price and external debt-financing shocks.