Other papers

2,041 items available

Permanent URI for this collection

These are stand alone informal publications of high-level research.

Items in this collection

Now showing 1 - 10 of 2041
  • Publication
    Egypt - Gender Equality and Climate Change: Background Note to the Climate Change and Development Report
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-03-12) World Bank Group
    Egypt’s National Climate Change Strategy 2050, launched in May 2022 sets out an ambitious and comprehensive 324-billion-dollar plan to support a stronger, greener Egyptian economy. The Strategy integrates the climate change dimension into the general planning of all sectors in the country, especially in areas such as energy, transportation, agriculture, and water resources. In addition, the climate summit COP27 held in Egypt in November 2022 gave new impetus to Egypt’s path to green transformation when the Government announced a 500 million dollars deal with Germany, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the U.S. to shrink its fossil gas consumption and expand renewable energy. COP27 also underscored the need for countries to secure prosperity and decent jobs while delivering on the goals of greening the economy through a just transition. Egypt has committed to turning climate action into an economic and social development opportunity, for example, by reskilling and skilling workers in many new jobs in the green economy, enhancing resilience and adaptive capacity to climate change, and alleviating the associated negative impacts. This policy brief aims to contribute to the discussion on how gender equality can become an integral part of green economy strategies in Egypt and how equal access for women and men to decent green jobs can be enhanced. The brief also aims to discuss and move forward the agenda on delivering a gender transformative and inclusive just transition in climate-related issues. It provides an overview of the gendered impacts of climate change in selected vulnerable sectors in Egypt and highlights women’s role in climate resilience while identifying barriers and opportunities for gender-responsive climate action.
  • Publication
    Heading Towards 1.5ºC - Impacts on Labor Demand in Selected Countries
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-03-12) Lehr, Ulrike; Politt, Hector
    The United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) closed with a statement signaling the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era, a just and equitable transition, deep emissions cuts, and scaled-up finance. Decarbonization and green transition more broadly are recognized as essential to green recovery and will inevitably be implemented, but governments struggle with the how and when and how to pay for policy questions. Often, the green transition is seen more as a challenge than an opportunity for development. One policy instrument to move to a low-carbon pathway is a carbon tax, which would disincentivize carbon-intensive activities, and the revenues generated could be recycled to finance climate actions. When climate actions, such as renewable energy investments and energy efficiency programs, are designed in a way that stimulates job creation, a double dividend can be achieved: lower emissions and more jobs. The paper assesses different policy designs around a carbon tax regime and shows simulation results for direct and indirect implications for jobs using the MINDSET model, a price endogenous MRIO hosted by the World Bank.
  • Publication
    Challenges and Opportunities of the Economic Integration of the Venezuelan Population in the Peruvian Labor Market
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-03-08) World Bank
    This study demonstrates that although Venezuelans are more educated relative to Peruvians and most of them have successfully entered the Peruvian labor market, they are mostly employed in low-quality jobs and with a degree of skills mismatch. Most of them are overqualified and have transitioned to more elementary occupations. Furthermore, four out of five Venezuelan workers are employed informally and their returns to higher education are lower than those perceived by Peruvians despite working more hours per week. In addition, we find that they have a significant participation in the digital economy, mainly in delivery platforms, and that two-thirds of Venezuelan workers send remittances abroad. Finally, the report concludes that whether refugees and migrants have the right to work at the level of his or her qualifications and capabilities depends on: (i) the regulatory process to validate their educational degrees, (ii) the migration policy and status, and (iii) the local attitudes towards Venezuelan migration.
  • Publication
    Climate-Sensitive Mining: Case Studies: Background Paper for Building Resilience: A Green Growth Framework for Mobilizing Mining Investment
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-02-27) Sekar, Sri; Lundin, Kyle; Tucker, Christopher; Figueiredo, Joe; Tordo, Silvana; Aguilar, Javier
    The mining industry is one of conflicting identities. Mining firms can add tremendous value to the resource-rich countries where their mines operate but also to their shareholders. Further, the industry extracts and ferries to the market many of the raw materials that are crucial to industrial and economic progress around the world, creating a magnifying effect to its added value to global GDP. This report is part of a more comprehensive study intended to investigate the potential for leveraging the mining industry to drive the uptake of climate sensitive technologies and practices in emerging and developing markets. The study includes four background reports, Methodology and Value Chain Analysis, Mining Firms’ Climate-Sensitive Initiatives, Climate Sensitive Mining: Case Studies (this report), and Policy Approaches to Climate Change in Mineral Rich Countries, and an overview report on Building Resilience: A Green Growth Framework for Mobilizing Mining Investment. This report is intended to deliver an account of mining technologies, processes, and strategies that seek to incorporate new, green technologies that have the potential to diversify local and national economies where the mine operates. This report is not intended to provide an ordered ranking of industry trends, mine sites, or the companies engaged in these operations. An analysis of that nature would likely not produce a sufficiently diverse set of case studies to provide an industry-wide perspective. As a result, in selecting the case studies the report prioritizes comprehensiveness and diversity.
  • Publication
    Guidance Note on Uzbekistan Green Taxonomy
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-02-20) World Bank
    This Guidance Note serves to support the government of Uzbekistan in the design of a national Green Taxonomy. A green taxonomy sets out rules for classifying environmentally sustainable activities and can be instrumental inthe transition to a Green Economy by guiding policies and public resource flows, and influencing the private sector’s investment response. The Guidance Note discusses methodological choices for the taxonomy and their policy implications, reviews existing international practices, and recommends a model taxonomy and roadmap for further development of the taxonomy. A key message in the note is the importance of setting clear strategic goals that will inform the selection of the taxonomy’s environmental objectives and its other features. Also discussed are theinstitutional arrangements to coordinate the actions and inputs of multiple stakeholders during the development process of the taxonomy, and the importance of strong oversight and consistent enforcement of taxonomy rules by a competent regulatory body.
  • Publication
    Scaling Up Collaborative Social Accountability in Complex Governance Systems: A Relational Approach for Evidencing Sustainability
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-02-13) Guerzovich, Florencia; Wadeson, Alix
    When social accountability interventions scale up and their sustainability depends on the interactions of many agents and system components, related results are rarely observable at the end of an intervention. The 2019 OECD Development Assistance Committee’s (OECD DAC) revamped evaluations criteria for assessing sustainability acknowledges that such results are often emergent, and should be monitored and evaluated with this in mind. It therefore emphasizes a turn towards assessing complex processes prospectively. It also asks evaluations to consider how likely it is that these results are evident at the time they are monitored or evaluated. However, the social accountability field continues to have gaps regarding doing this effectively in practice. This paper presents and provides evidence from testing an innovative operational approach that has promising potential to support this aim - a sequential, relational rubric. This approach can support practitioners to monitor, evaluate and learn about the causal processes of scale up of social accountability interventions with an eye towards sustainability i.e., considering prospective sustainability. It is grounded in systems thinking, co-production and social learning theory, as well as links with collective governance and social contract theory for development. Evidence yielded from the authors’ testing of this approach on a sample of diverse projects from the Global Partnership for Social Accountability (GPSA) program revealed that the alleged ‘absence of evidence’ dilemma of social accountability scale up is due to ill-fitting concepts and methods for assessment. It challenges existing assumptions and findings that claim that social accountabilityprocesses do not scale and are unsustainable. The authors propose that by using fit-for-purpose concepts and methods with a focus on social learning and compromise – also called a ‘resonance pathway to scale’ which this paper discusses in detail – it is possible to observe loosely coordinated scale up processes at work in many (but not all) social accountability interventions and identify tangible evidence of prospective sustainability. An important caveat is that these processes, the outcomes they generate, and the corresponding evidence often look qualitatively different than the original intervention design and predictions for scale-up at that point in time. This is because the process of deliberation and compromise inherent to social accountability work in dynamic local systems introduces changes and new conditions for uptake by diverse actors in the public sector, civil society, and donor institutions. The paper concludes that even relatively small-scale localized projects of three to five years with budgets of less than one million USD, across different contexts and sectors can produce processes and outcomes which contribute to many forms of sustainability, including via scaleup. Furthermore, the cross-fertilization of learning and aggregation of results for scale-up across projects within and beyond the GPSA (and other programs) can help monitoring evaluation and learning (MEL) and social accountability practitioners alike to deliver on a program’s mandate. Doing so can also create new knowledge for the wider social accountability field that siloed interventions, lacking suitable concepts and methods for assessing scale-up and prospective sustainability, often fail to produce. The paper ends with recommendations for taking forward this approach and the associated benefits, implications and required investments
  • Publication
    Toward Developing a Mobility and Gender Index
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-01-26) Kurshitashvili, Nato; Humbert, Anne Laure; Bihi Ouali, Laila Ait
    Although the benefits of a gender-inclusive approach to mobility for transport decarbonization, access to jobs, and human capital advancement have been increasingly recognized globally, this topic has not received sufficient attention. The lack of attention to gendered mobility barriers is partly due to a limited understanding of the wider benefits of inclusive transport services for development, which is caused by the absence of sex-disaggregated mobility data highlighting gender inequalities. One of the obstacles to this gender-inclusive approach is the absence of a global gender indicator to track gender-based inequalities in mobility across countries and time. The lack of such an index: (i) hinders policymakers and development agencies from prioritizing this issue, setting project, program, and policy priorities, and monitoring performance, and (ii) discourages efforts to improve the quantity and quality of sex-disaggregated data related to mobility. This paper summarizes the exploratory research conducted by the World Bank’s Transport Global Practice in 2022-23 to construct a mobility and gender index (MGI). The report presents a six-dimension theoretical framework, outlines data pre-processing and indicator selection procedures, and describes the technical steps taken to develop the measurement framework for the index. Various approaches for measuring gender gaps and levels are explored, with potential aggregation within dimensions and the presentation of scores. The report includes visualizations of some of the dimension scores as heatmaps and highlights key findings. Finally, it acknowledges data gaps and outlines the necessary next steps to develop the MGI.
  • Publication
    Impact of Universal Accessibility in Tertiary Infrastructure Projects of Indonesia and the KOTAKU Project: A Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of Two Pilot Projects
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-01-24) World Bank
    This NSUP Universal Accessibility cost benefit analysis pilots is part of the Universal Accessibility Toolkit developed under the project. It performs a economic assessment of two pilot sub-investments of the project, making a case for the quantitative benefits of early inclusion of UA versus retrofitting downstream.
  • Publication
    Guidance Note for Producing and Disseminating Gender Factbooks
    (Washington, DC, 2024-01-23) World Bank
    This guidance note provides recommendations for effectively communicating gender statistics through gender factbooks. A gender factbook is a comprehensive publication that disseminates gender statistics through visuals and tables accompanied by relevant analysis and legal or policy frameworks that give context to the data presented. This guidance note is intended to support NSO efforts to improve existing gender factbooks or to assist a country in developing its first gender factbook. Section 2 outlines the motivation for reporting on gender data and creating a gender factbook. Section 3 provides guidance on producing and disseminating a gender factbook, leveraging best-practice examples from a comprehensive review of existing gender factbooks and publications that focus on improving the communication and dissemination of gender statistics. Section 4 concludes, and the appendixes provide valuable sources, samples, and templates. Applying the practices presented in this guidance note will allow countries to improve their ability to communicate gender statistics, which serve as a critical input to designing and monitoring policies to improve development opportunities for all.
  • Publication
    Enabling Data-Driven Innovation: Learning from Korea’s Data Policies and Practices for Harnessing AI
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-01-22) World Bank
    Over the past few decades, the Republic of Korea has consciously undertaken initiatives to transform its economy into a competitive, data-driven system. The primary objectives of this transition were to stimulate economic growth and job creation, enhance the nation’s capacity to withstand adversities such as the aftermath of COVID-19, and position it favorably to capitalize on emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence (AI). The Korean government has endeavored to accomplish these objectives through establishing a dependable digital data infrastructure and a comprehensive set of national data policies. This policy note aims to present a comprehensive synopsis of Korea’s extensive efforts to establish a robust digital data infrastructure and utilize data as a key driver for innovation and economic growth. The note additionally addresses the fundamental elements required to realize these benefits of data, including data policies, data governance, and data infrastructure. Furthermore, the note highlights some key results of Korea’s data policies, including the expansion of public data opening, the development of big data platforms, and the growth of the AI Hub. It also mentions the characteristics and success factors of Korea’s data policy, such as government support and the reorganization of institutional infrastructures. However, it acknowledges that there are still challenges to overcome, such as in data collection and utilization as well as transitioning from a government-led to a market-friendly data policy. The note concludes by providing developing countries and emerging economies with specific insights derived from Korea’s forward-thinking policy making that can assist them in harnessing the potential and benefits of data.