Bøger udgivet af World Bank Publications

Two decades after its original publication, The Analysis of Household Surveys is being reissued with a new preface by its author, Sir Angus Deaton, recipient of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

The report is a companion piece to WDR 2018, and examines the record of South Asian countries in the area of early childhood education, schooling, teaching, skills and higher education.

The benefits of including work-based learning (WBL) as part of vocational education and training (VET) are widely recognized. But little is known about how school-based systems can best incorporate WBL. This report provides recommendations and international examples for expanding the use of WBL in VET.

Brazil approaches its 2018 election with an economy that is gradually recovering from the deepest recession in its recent economic history. This book explores the drivers of future employment and income growth. Its key finding: Brazil needs to dramatically improve its performance across all industries if the country is to provide better jobs.

This book is motivated by the need to understand the possible drivers of future income and employment growth. Its key finding: Brazil needs to dramatically improve its performance in terms of productivity if the country is to generate lasting gains in incomes and provide better jobs for its citizens.

Brings together public financial management and public sector reform experiences from eight countries in East Asia. This book examines how reforms have been implemented in those countries and explores key lessons that can help reformers to further advance their endeavors.

Romania's living standards are converging with those of the European Union, but the country still has the largest share of poor people in the EU, with widening disparities in economic opportunity. Romania must address its institutional challenges if it is to sustain growth and share prosperity among all its citizens.

With growing global water scarcity and projections that indicate the need to increase both agricultural production and agricultural water use, it is increasingly advocated to focus efforts on improving agricultural water productivity and efficiency - and thus achieve more crop per drop.

Documents systematically the gaps between current and potential trade in South Asia and addresses important specific barriers that have held trade back.

Focuses on the challenge of youth engagement in school and at work. This report shows that youth prospects in the labor market are dimmed by policies favoring existing workers. Also, youth are often ill equipped to meet an increasingly challenging labor market. It discusses new policies, targeted at youth, that Brazil could prioritize.

Offers a practical exploration of the three interdependent dimensions of trade connectivity in the Mediterranean: maritime networks, port efficiency, and hinterland connectivity. Understanding how trade connectivity works is important to policy makers concerned with the economic benefits of large investments in infrastructure.

Liberia has been influenced by the Ebola crisis since 2014, but the economy is now recovering quickly. Still, significant challenges lie ahead. Agriculture, an important sector that employs approximately half of the labor force, still has a weak growth trajectory. Many rural people are not well connected to markets and live below the poverty line. To use limited resources effectively, strategic planning and prioritization of public investment are essential. Particularly, the Ebola crisis revealed the vulnerability of the country's transport connectivity and health systems. This book analyzes the country's transport connectivity, identifying the existing bottlenecks and possible economic potentials. By taking advantage of the country's first-ever georeferenced road network data, the analysis casts light on various aspects of connectivity, such as rural accessibility, market access, access to port and health facilities and multimodal connectivity, including cabotage. It is shown that transport connectivity is crucial to increasing agricultural production, stimulating agglomeration economies, and supporting people's access to health care services. Significant resources are likely to be required to meet the existing gap. The book estimates the financial needs by development objective and discusses important policy issues, including the possibility of public-private partnerships to finance transport infrastructure.

Vietnam stands out as one of the most dynamic emerging countries in the East Asia and Pacific region. Since major reforms in the 1990s, the country has experienced an annual average growth rate of 6-7 percent, and extreme poverty rate has fallen from over 50 percent to 3 percent. Yet, the rapid growth and decentralization process have brought significant pressure on provincial governments in terms of local infrastructure investments and urban services delivery.With an annual shortfall of US$9 billion in funding for local infrastructure investments, provincial governments in Vietnam need to move toward a more market-driven financing model. This transition will require enhanced financial and technical capacity of local governments as well as an enabling environment for subnational borrowing.This report explores the development of a pilot financial instrument that could catalyze the subnational borrowing market in Vietnam. The report presents the findings of three assessments, which focused on (a) the borrowing capacity and creditworthiness of selected provincial governments, (b) the capacity of the commercial banking sector to invest in provincial governments, and (c) the current status of Vietnam's regulatory framework. The findings of this report will be useful to policy makers in Vietnam, providing an understanding of the key issues associated with a shift toward a more affordable and efficient local infrastructure financing model and presenting a preliminary roadmap for development of a pilot instrument. The report will also be of interest to policy makers in other transition countries that are facing similar challenges.

Migration presents a stark policy dilemma. Research repeatedly confirms that migrants, their families back home, and the countries that welcome them experience large economic and social gains. Easing immigration restrictions is one of the most effective tools for ending poverty and sharing prosperity across the globe. Yet, we see widespread opposition in destination countries, where migrants are depicted as the primary cause of many of their economic problems, from high unemployment to declining social services.Moving for Prosperity: Global Migration and Labor Markets addresses this dilemma. In addition to providing comprehensive data and empirical analysis of migration patterns and their impact, the report argues for a series of policies that work with, rather than against, labor market forces. Policy makers should aim to ease short-run dislocations and adjustment costs so that the substantial long-term benefits are shared more evenly. Only then can we avoid draconian migration restrictions that will hurt everybody.Moving for Prosperity aims to inform and stimulate policy debate, facilitate further research, and identify prominent knowledge gaps. It demonstrates why existing income gaps, demographic differences, and rapidly declining transportation costs mean that global mobility will continue to be a key feature of our lives for generations to come. Its audience includes anyone interested in one of the most controversial policy debates of our time.

Promoting the smooth labor market integration and early labor market success of workers has increasingly become an important economic and social development aim globally. The Nepal government sees addressing the social and economic challenges of youth, and leveraging their social and economic prospects, as critical for the country’s economic growth and development. There has been limited systematic, policy-oriented empirical research conducted on labor and livelihoods in Nepal. Dedicated examinations of the labor conditions, behaviors, and outcomes of youth are rarer still. Responding to the knowledge needs expressed by the Nepal government and other stakeholders in the country, this book aims to improve our understanding of the labor market conditions, behaviors, and outcomes of Nepalese youth. It examines these aspects in Nepal’s domestic labor market as well as in relation to labor migration to India and other countries, including temporary 'foreign employment' of Nepalese workers under bilateral labor agreements between destination countries and Nepal. In so doing, the report seeks to present insights and implications for research and public policy, with the goal of improving the labor market prospects of Nepalese youth. The collective findings in the report point to three directions for orienting public policy and program initiatives. First is raising rural labor productivity, urban labor demand, and urban worker†“job matching efficiency. Second is supporting the labor market integration of rural youth migrating to urban parts of Nepal and of youth labor migrants returning from India and other countries. Third is improving the orientation and efficacy of labor skill training.

Integration into global markets can improve the efficiency of the Argentinian economy, providing opportunities for private investment to flourish and for the associated benefits to accrue to consumers. Among many policies that are important for integrating into the global economy, particularly relevant are trade, investment, and competition policies. They all share a common attribute: the capacity to shape the incentives of firms to improve resource allocation and to strengthen productivity while integrating into international markets. Once properly combined, investment, trade, and competition polices have mutually reinforcing relationships in the sense that growth dividends stemming from reforms in one policy area are reinforced when properly combined with reforms in the other two. Against this backdrop, this report follows a three-pronged approach. It presents a set of robust empirical analyses †“ drawing from both general and partial equilibrium exercises - to assess the potential impacts from trade, competition, and investment policy reforms. It offers a new comparative review of international experience with structural microeconomic reform programs to bring insights for Argentina’s design and sequencing of such reforms. Finally, it presents individual reform recommendations for each institution in charge of the three respective policy areas in an integrated step-by-step framework from the firm perspective to illustrate the critical challenges to investment and internationalization for Argentinian firms.

Natural resources have the transformational potential to support economic and political stability as well as contribute to national prosperity and economic development. However, in countries dependent upon natural resource sectors, poor management of these sectors often contributes to corruption, illicit financial flows (IFFs) and thus, poverty. Adequate transparency and accountability in regulatory management of these sectors is a challenge for resource rich countries.    Poor licensing decisions in natural resource management can open a pandora’s box of corruption risks. This manual provides methods and options based on good practices to improve transparency, accountability, and integrity in the regulatory licensing process and integrity due diligence.  The manual borrows models from the Basel Core Principle ‘fit and proper’ concept, and provides options for conducting effective (a) beneficial ownership;  (b) criminal/legal;  and (c) conflicts of interest checks, with a goal of integrating these into the regulatory licensing process. The manual also identifies common legal framework defects that can facilitate corruption risks, and offers options based on principles of regulatory integrity to reduce these risks.   The good practices identified can help countries allocate limited financial resources in conducting thorough background checks in a cost-effective manner, as well as meet EITI’s requirements for public disclosure of beneficial owners and politically exposed persons.  These strategies for reducing opportunities for corruption in extractive sectors can help reduce IFFs that can sap resources from the economy and inhibit a country’s ability to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

By using state-of-the-art modeling techniques, this study simulates population, housing, economic activity, commuting times, transport and trade across the 266 unions that constitute Great Dhaka, taking into account flood vulnerability, traffic congestion and other location conditions.

Provides an understanding of equity in tertiary enrolment in Sub-Saharan African countries, to examine the extent to which inequity inhibits the ability of African universities to effectively drive improvements in overall quality of life and economic competitiveness, and to identify effectiveness of government equity policies.

Drylands account for three-quarters of Sub-Saharan Africa's cropland, two-thirds of cereal production, and four-fifths of livestock holdings. Today frequent and severe shocks, especially droughts, limit the livelihood opportunities available to millions of households and undermine efforts to eradicate poverty in the drylands. Prospects for sustainable development of drylands are assessed in this book through the lens of resilience, understood here to mean the ability of people to withstand and respond to droughts and other shocks. An original model was developed expressly to consistently and coherently evaluate different type of interventions on the ground, which provided a common framework to anticipate the scale of the challenges likely to arise in drylands, as well as to generate insights into opportunities for addressing those challenges. Such modeling framework consisted in a) estimating the baseline vulnerability profiles of people living in drylands (2010), b) estimate the evolution of vulnerability by 2030 under a range of assumptions, c) calculated the number of people affectedby drought in the different administrative units of each country, and d) evaluate different types of interventions in agriculture and livestock for mitigating drought impact by calculating the potential for reducing the number of people affected for each scenario and conducting a simplified - benefit/cost (B/C) analysis for each type of intervention. For livestock, simulation models were used to estimate the impacts of feed balances, livestock production, and household income resilience interventions under different climate scenarios). For agriculture, the DSSAT (Decision Support System for-Agrotechnology Transfer) framework was used to assess the potential impact on yields likely to result from adoption of five crop farming technologies: (1) drought-tolerant varieties, (2) heat-tolerant varieties, (3) additional fertilizer, (4) agroforestry practices, (S) irrigation (6) water-harvesting techniques and selected combinations thereof.

The Democratic Republic of Congo Urbanization Review develops a diagnostic of the current situation of urbanization in DRC, and identifies the key bottlenecks holding back the potential benefits of urbanization.

Poverty remains a pervasive and complex phenomenon in Sub-Saharan Africa. Part of the agenda in recent years to tackle poverty in Africa has been the launching of social safety nets programs. All countries have now deployed safety net interventions as part of their core development programs. The number of programs has skyrocketed since the mid-2000s though many programs remain limited in size. This shift in social policy reflects the progressive evolution in the understanding of the role that social safety nets can play in the fight against poverty and vulnerability, and more generally in the human capital and growth agenda. Evidence on their impacts on equity, resilience, and opportunity is growing, and makes a foundational case for investments in safety nets as a major component of national development plans. For this potential to be realized, however, safety net programs need to be significantly scaled-up. Such scaling up will involve a series of technical considerations to identify the parameters, tools, and processes that can deliver maximum benefits to the poor and vulnerable. However, in addition to technical considerations, and at least as importantly, this report argues that a series of decisive shifts need to occur in three other critical spheres: political, institutional, and fiscal. First, the political processes that shape the extent and nature of social policy need to be recognized, by stimulating political appetite for safety nets, choosing politically smart parameters, and harnessing the political impacts of safety nets to promote their sustainability. Second, the anchoring of safety net programs in institutional arrangements - related to the overarching policy framework for safety nets, the functions of policy and coordination, as well as program management and implementation - is particularly important as programs expand and are increasingly implemented through national channels. And third, in most countries, the level and predictability of resources devoted to the sector needs to increase for safety nets to reach the desired scale, through increased efficiency, increased volumes and new sources of financing, and greater ability to effectively respond to shocks. This report highlights the implications which political, institutional, and fiscal aspects have for the choice and design of programs. Fundamentally, it argues that these considerations are critical to ensure the successful scaling-up of social safety nets in Africa, and that ignoring them could lead to technically-sound, but practically impossible, choices and designs.

The second edition of the Impact Evaluation in Practice handbook is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to impact evaluation for policymakers and development practitioners.

Provides a diagnostic of residential network water in Uganda, focusing on access and affordability for the poor, and using data from the latest national household survey.

Provides a diagnostic of access to and affordability of water and sanitation in Uganda, focusing on services for the poor, and using the most recent qualitative and household survey data.