Publication: Western Balkans 6 Country Climate and Development Report
Loading...
Files
2,434 downloads
151 downloads
548 downloads
214 downloads
39 downloads
Date
2024-07-16
ISSN
Published
2024-07-16
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
This Regional Western Balkans Countries Climate and Development Report (CCDR) stands out in several ways. In a region that often lacks cohesive regional alliances, this report emphasizes how the challenges faced across countries are often common and interconnected, and, importantly, that climate action requires coordination on multiple fronts. Simultaneously, it illustrates the differences across countries, places, and people that require targeted strategies and interventions. This report demonstrates how shocks and stressors re intensifying and how investments in adaptation could bring significant benefits in the form of avoided losses, accelerated economic potential, and amplified social and economic spillovers. Given the region’s high emission and energy intensity and the limitations of its current fossil fuel-based development model, the report articulates a path to greener and more resilient growth, a path that is more consistent with the aspiration of accession to the EU. The report finds that the net zero transition can be undertaken without compromising the economic potential of the Western Balkans and that it could lead to higher growth than under the Reference Scenario (RS) with appropriate structural reforms.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“World Bank Group. 2024. Western Balkans 6 Country Climate and Development Report. CCDR Series. © World Bank Group. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/41881 License: CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Western Balkans Regular Economic Report No. 27, Spring 2025(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-04-29)The Western Balkans Regular Economic Report highlights the significant impact of extreme climate events on labor markets in the region. Rising temperatures, heavy precipitation, and other severe weather events are exacerbating existing vulnerabilities and creating new challenges for both workers and employers. These climate changes, combined with the global shift towards a low-carbon economy, are reshaping employment patterns in key sectors such as energy, agriculture, and tourism. Direct climate impacts, including heat stress, droughts, and floods, are affecting workers, their families, and businesses. Additionally, structural shifts in employment demand and skills requirements are emerging. For instance, areas dependent on tourism in the Western Balkans are increasingly susceptible to extreme weather events, which can lead to a decrease in visitor numbers, disrupt revenue streams, and threaten local jobs. Looking forward, the changing climate and the transition to a greener economy will necessitate significant workforce adaptation. This includes reforms to social protection systems and employment services to better safeguard individuals and facilitate labor market transitions. These measures are essential to protect people and support the evolving demands of the labor market in response to climate change.Publication Western Balkans Regular Economic Report, No.22, Fall 2022(Washington, DC, 2022-10)The economies of the Western Balkans continue to face a turbulent external environment, placing households, firms, and governments under acute stress. Just as the post-COVID recovery of 2021 began to fade and the region returned to a normalized rate of economic growth, the Western Balkan region now faces a new combination of challenges. The war in Ukraine, and the resultant sharp increase and energy prices and slowdown in global growth, is weighing on economic performance in all six economies. Higher energy and food prices have pushed inflation to levels unseen for many years, eroding purchasing power and business confidence. Monetary tightening in advanced economies is pushing up financing costs and weakening external demand. Following a strong rebound in 2021, growth, although still robust, was on a decelerating path in the first half of 2022. In Q1 of 2022, the Western Balkan economies remained resilient overall, supported by sizable policy actions at the EU, euro area, and national levels. First-quarter growth was particularly strong in tourism-based economies and in Serbia. However, growth decelerated in Q2, as countries had to deal with the direct consequences of the war and is projected to continue decelerating in the second half of the year reflecting higher base levels of growth in Q3 and Q4 2021 and the stronger global headwinds.Publication Western Balkans Regular Economic Report No.24, Fall 2023(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-10-19)In the context of weakening global demand, growth in the Western Balkans decelerated over the course of 2022 and into 2023. Against the background of the lasting effects of shocks from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, sticky inflation, and tighter financial conditions, global demand has been weakening, and this has a divergent impact across the Western Balkans (WB6). On the one hand, the slowdown in global demand contributed to weaker-than expected performance of industrial production in the whole European Union (EU) region and in the WB6. On the other hand, global demand has proved more resilient in services and, for travel, with twice as many people traveling globally during Q1 2023 as in the same period in 2022 (UNWTO). This has particularly benefited Albania, Kosovo, and Montenegro, where services exports have reached new record highs. In contrast, weakening global demand for goods has weighed on Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), North Macedonia and Serbia. On the demand side, private consumption remained in general an important growth driver, despite rising price pressures. Reforms are needed to consolidate the recovery toward sustainable growth, while negotiations with the EU hold the potential to bolster prospects in the Western Balkans. As the WB6 agriculture sector is undergoing a major structural transformation, efforts to green agriculture are also important to ensure access to the EU market and for the competitiveness of agriculture, rural development, and food and nutrition security. Most WB6 countries have recently included agriculture greening in their development strategies. Historically, the environmental footprint of the WB6 agriculture sector has been relatively low. But this has been more an unintended outcome of still high rurality and low farming intensity rather than a result of public policy and expenditure choices. Agricultural public expenditures, while substantial in terms of amounts and adequate to influence agricultural production, have not yet prioritized financing of greening and climate-smart agriculture. It is important for the WB6 countries to accelerate greening of their agriculture by learning from the EU’s green transition and better utilization of the existing public funds available for agricultural development.Publication Western Balkans Regular Economic Report No. 25, Spring 2024(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-04-11)Economic growth in the Western Balkans slowed to 2.6 percent in 2023, from the 3.4 percent reached in 2022, reflecting the impact of a weak European economy weighed down by sequential shocks. Overall, the WB6 region has experienced a rise in total hours worked driven by employment growth and labor force expansion, especially driven by women joining the labor force. Poverty in the Western Balkans returned to its declining trend during 2023, but at a slower pace than pre-pandemic. A robust fiscal performance and solid rate of gross domestic product (GDP) growth led to a fall in debt as a share of GDP. After increasing to levels not seen in several decades, inflation rates in the WB6 fell significantly during 2023. Growth projections for the medium term have increased slightly, reflecting cautious optimism that, having weathered a flurry of shocks over recent years, the Western Balkans is beginning to see a return to trend economic performance. However, while the WB6 region is expected to return on its pre-pandemic trend in 2024, this is insufficient to enable meaningful convergence with European Union (EU) income levels over the medium term. The spotlight in this edition of the Western Balkans Regular Economic Report focuses on the role of cities as engines of growth and leading actor in the green transition. This spotlight recommends action on three main fronts to make cities in the Western Balkans greener. First, it is crucial to reduce urban sprawl and make cities more compact. Second, cities must bring down their emissions, also because this will have immediate improvement on socio-economic and environmental outcomes. And third, cities must take actions to reduce extreme urban heat and enhance preparedness for it.Publication Western Balkans Regular Economic Report No.23, Spring 2023(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-06-16)The six countries of the Western Balkans have seen their resilience tested over the last three years. Growth in the Western Balkan economies started strong in early 2022, before moderating toward year-end, but the impact of major shocks, such as electricity and heating outages, has been less severe than expected. Inflation surged to a two-decade high in 2022 in almost all economies, and price pressures remain elevated in early 2023. Higher food and energy prices have affected low-income households especially severely, resulting in a much slower pace of poverty reduction in 2022 despite universal government support. In the medium term, the Western Balkans continues to have a positive outlook, but reforms are needed to rebuild buffers, accelerate the green transition, and to address key structural challenges. The ongoing energy crisis has highlighted the need to accelerate the green transition across Europe, including in the Western Balkans. A key starting point in this regard is to accelerate the move toward carbon pricing and to increase the use of environmental fiscal measures that incentivize households and firms to shift toward lower carbon intensity with respect to economic activity.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Greater Heights(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-12)Twenty-seven countries have reached high-income status since 1990. Ten of these are in the Europe and Central Asia region and have joined the European Union. Another 20 in the region have become more prosperous since the 1990s. However, their transition to high-income status has been delayed. These middle-income countries have found that the prospects for growth to high-income status have become even more difficult since the 2007–09 global financial crisis. This reflects partly a slowdown in structural reforms at home and partly the challenges associated with a deterioration in the global environment. The concern has emerged that many countries in the region may be caught in the middle-income trap, a phase in development characterized by a recurring deceleration in growth and by per capita incomes that are systematically below the high-income threshold. To ensure that these countries overcome the obstacles to growth and achieve progress toward high-income status, policy makers need to make the transition from a strategy driven largely by investment to a strategy that is supported by the importation and diffusion of global capital, knowledge, and technology and then to a strategy that complements these with innovation. The report Greater Heights: Growing to High Income in Europe and Central Asia relies on the 3i strategy described in World Development Report 2024—investment, infusion, and innovation—to propose policy options to assist middle-income countries in Europe and Central Asia in the effort to reach high-income status. Drawing on comprehensive empirical analysis, the report offers actionable recommendations that will enable policy makers to advance stronger economic growth across the region. Such a transition will require continued and sustained foundational reform to maximize the drivers of economic growth while pivoting to new transformative reforms to promote the development of more complex economic structures and institutions. These involve the need to discipline incumbents, boost the role of the private sector, strengthen the competitive environment, and reward merit. The emphasis on a strategy driven by innovation is also critically important for those countries that have already attained high-income status.Publication Türkiye Country Climate and Development Report(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-06-13)Integrating climate and development is a pillar of the World Bank Group’s Climate Change Action Plan 2021-25. To advance its implementation, the Bank Group has launched a new, core diagnostic tool: the Country Climate and Development Report, a new, core diagnostic tool that analyzes how a country’s development goals can be achieved in the context of adapting to and mitigating against climate change. These reports will reflect the country’s climate commitments and identify ways to support their implementation through public and private sector solutions. They will capture the centrality of people in policies on climate change adaptation and mitigation, assessing how climate risks affect people, and ways in which governments can build resilience and address poverty, distributional and job impact of climate change and climate action. The Turkiye Country Climate and Development Report explores how climate action, in line with the country’s mitigation goal of achieving net zero emissions by 2053 as well as its adaptation and resilience needs, interact with its growth and development path and contribute to achieving the country’s development objectives, help seize opportunities offered by green technologies, protect the economy against longer-term risks such as large-scale disasters or carbon lock-in as the world transitions towards zero-carbon technologies, and support a just and inclusive transition for all.Publication World Bank Annual Report 2024(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-25)This annual report, which covers the period from July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2024, has been prepared by the Executive Directors of both the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the International Development Association (IDA)—collectively known as the World Bank—in accordance with the respective bylaws of the two institutions. Ajay Banga, President of the World Bank Group and Chairman of the Board of Executive Directors, has submitted this report, together with the accompanying administrative budgets and audited financial statements, to the Board of Governors.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 Tanzania Country Climate and Development Report(Washington, DC: World Bank Group, 2024-12-12)The Country Climate and Development Report (CCDR) for Tanzania identifies the impact of climate change on the country’s economy. The CCDR uses macroeconomic, climate, sectoral, institutional, and financial models to identify the economy’s exposure to climate risks and the opportunities to integrate climate action and development. High poverty levels and dependence on rainfed, low-productivity agriculture leaves Tanzania’s economy vulnerable to climate risks. By 2050, climate change could push an additional 2.6 million people in poverty and force up to 13 million Tanzanians to migrate internally. The CCDR presents how implementation of three multisectoral intervention areas could generate climate-positive, resilient, and inclusive growth in Tanzania by 2050. These are: integrating climate considerations when strengthening human capital and social protection; optimizing land and water use and management to boost agriculture and rural productivity, augment climate resilience, and lower greenhouses gas emissions; and prioritizing resilient and low-carbon transport, energy and digital infrastructure systems in urban areas and different sectors. The CCDR details governance arrangements for effective climate change action, presents investment needs, and describes options for mobilizing financing. Action is needed both to reduce vulnerabilities of Tanzania’s current economy and realize the country’s Vision 2050 goal of a more inclusive and sustainable growth trajectory. Targeted climate action could boost private investment and job creation, enabling Tanzania to meet its development objectives in the face of global risks. Technical background reports prepared for the CCDR are available upon request.