Bøger af World Bank

Too often, even reform leaders in countries fail to adopt and implement policies that they know are necessary for sustained economic development. They are encumbered by adverse political incentives, running the risk of losing office should they try to do the right thing. When technically sound policies are selected on paper, implementation through the public system can run into perverse norms of behavior among public officials and citizens to extract private benefits from the public sector at the expense of the greater public interest. ''Making Politics Work for Development'' is about how to make politics work for economic development rather than against it. It focuses on research about two forces citizens political engagement and transparency that explain and hold the potential to improve political incentives and norms of behavior in the public sector. The research shows that the confluence of transparency and political engagement can be a driving force for countries to transition toward better functioning public sector institutions, starting with their own initial and contextual conditions. To harness the potential of these forces, policy actors should target transparency to nourish the quality of political engagement so that citizens can hold leaders accountable for the public goods needed for development."

One out of every five Latin Americans or around 130 million people have never known anything but poverty, subsisting on less than US$4-a-day throughout their lives. These are the region¿s chronically poor, who have remained so despite unprecedented inroads against poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean since the turn of the century. Left Behind: Chronic Poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean takes a closer look at the region's entrenched poor, who and where they are, and how existing policies need to change in order to effectively assist them. The book shows significant variations of rates of chronic poverty both across and within countries. Within a single country, some regions show incidence rates up to eight times higher than the lowest. Despite the higher rates of chronic poverty in rural areas, chronic poverty is as much an urban as a rural issue. In fact, considering absolute numbers, urban areas in many countries, including Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and the Dominican Republic, have more chronic poor than rural areas. Undoubtedly the region has come a long way during the decade in terms of poverty reduction, guided by a mix of sustained growth and increased levels in amounts and quality of public spending and programs targeted directly or indirectly to the chronic poor. While improving endowments and the context where the chronic poor live is a necessary condition going forward, the decade's experience suggests that it may not be enough to reach the chronic poor. The book posits that refinements to the existing policy toolkit - as opposed to more programs - may come a long way in helping the remaining poor. These refinements include intensifying efforts to improve coordination between different social and economic programs, which can boost the income generation process and deal with the intergenerational transmission of chronic poverty by investing in early childhood development. Equally important though, there is an urgent need to adapt programs to directly address the psychological toll of chronic poverty on people's mindset and aspirations, which currently undermines the effectiveness of the existing policy efforts.

Central America is in the midst of an important transformation. Central America Urbanization Review: Making Cities Work for Central America provides a better understanding of the implications of urbanization in the region, and the actions that central and local governments can take to reap the intended benefits of this transformation.

Investigates which mental abilities and behaviours allow Latin Americans to be successful in the labour market. It provides guidance for policy makers on how to foster learning and human development.

The central hypothesis examined in this report is whether inequality of opportunities (as opposed to inequality of outcomes) - starting from early in life and culminating into opportunities in the labor market - explains part of what many have labeled the Arab inequality puzzle.

Presents an overview of university-industry (U-I) collaboration in Sri Lanka by analysing responses to a survey of companies and universities on their U-I collaboration in 2007 and 2015.

Brings new elements to the public policy debate about alternatives that could effectively help remove barriers to female economic participation.

This volume offers a simple, systematic guide to creating a knowledge sharing practice in your organization. It shows how to build the enabling environment and develop the skills needed to capture and share knowledge gained from operational experiences to improve performance and scale-up successes. Its recommendations are grounded on the insights gained from the past seven years of collaboration between the World Bank and its clients around the world--ministries and national agencies operating in various sectors--who are working to strengthen their operations through robust knowledge sharing. While informed by the academic literature on knowledge management and organizational learning, this handbook's operational background and many real-world examples and tips provide a missing, practical foundation for public sector officials in developing countries and for development practitioners. However, though written with a public sector audience in mind, the overall concepts and approaches will also hold true for most organizations in the private sector and the developed world.

Provides a series of practical guidelines that can be used by project leaders to decide whether remote sensing may be useful for the problem at hand and suitable data sources to consider if so. The book concludes with a review of the literature on reliability statistics of remote-sensed estimations.

The World Bank's annual report on the external debt of developing countries includes comprehensive data for 125 developing countries, as well as summary data for regions and income groups.

The 2014 Labor Force Survey report seeks to contribute to solutions to the jobs challenge in Sierra Leone through a foundational analysis of the country's first specialized labor survey in nearly three decades.

Outlines an approach for facing two fundamental and unavoidable issues brought about by climate change uncertainty in water resources planning and project design.

Beyond Commodities shows that Latin America and the Caribbean's growth performance over the last decade cannot be reduced to the commodity boom: growth-promoting reforms that strengthened financial development, increased trade openness and improved infrastructure development also played a significant role and can continue doing so. Based on the econometric analysis of panel data from the 1970-2010 period for 126 countries, the study shows that, while the commodity boom facilitated growth in most of the region, it did not determine it. Domestic pro-growth policies and the maintenance of a sound macro-fiscal framework played a central role in explaining the region's good performance during last decade. It also shows that new growth "stars" such as Panama, Peru, Colombia and the Dominican Republic emerged during this period. In addition, a benchmarking exercise reveals which policy gaps will lead to the highest potential growth-payoffs for each country and helps identify potential trade-offs. Finally, with the worsening of external conditions, the authors conclude that the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean have no choice but to turn their attention to domestic drivers to keep growth going, as the structural reforms agenda remains unfinished.