Latin America and the Caribbean (LCR) will be center stage in the global development debate as leaders from around the world convene in Lima, Peru for the annual meetings of the World Bank Group and International Monetary Fund. Critical progress in poverty reduction has been made in the region over the last decade. The region's bottom 40 percent of the population saw growth eclipsing that seen by the group in every other region in the world. However, a global slowdown in economic growth and activity challenges these positive strides. The stories in this report embody concrete successes of countries working together with the World Bank. Innovative development approaches were designed and implemented. Individuals, communities, countries, and even regions benefited from better health, education, governance, disaster risk management, and more.
This paper quantifies the misallocation of manufacturing output and factors of production between establishments across Indian districts during 1989-2010. It first distills a number of stylized facts about misallocation in India, and demonstrates the validity of misallocation metrics by connecting them to regulatory changes in India that affected real property. With this background, the study next quantifies the implications and determinants of factor and output misallocation. Although more-productive establishments in India tend to produce more output, factors of production are grossly misallocated. A better allocation of output and factors of production is associated with greater output per worker. Misallocation of land plays a particularly important role in these challenges.
Africa is rapidly urbanizing and will lead the world's urban growth in the coming decades. Currently, Africa is the least‐urbanized continent, accommodating 11.3 percent of the world's urban population, and the Sub‐Saharan region is the continent's least‐urbanized area. However, the region's cities are expanding rapidly, by 2050; Africa's urban population is projected to reach 1.2 billion, with an urbanization rate of 58 percent (UN‐HABITAT 2014). With this rate of growth, Africa will overtake Asia as the world's most rapidly urbanizing region by 2025 (UN 2014). Although the nature and pace of urbanization varies among countries, with over a quarter of the world's fastest growing cities, Africa is undergoing a massive urban transition. Globally, cities are major drivers of economic growth, and the quality and location of housing has long-term consequences for inclusive growth. However, in Sub-Saharan Africa, urbanization is not accompanied by the level of per-capita economic growth or housing investment that is observed elsewhere in global trends. Incomes in Sub‐Saharan Africa (SSA) have not kept pace with urbanization, which, in many African countries, has not necessarily been accompanied by industrial growth and the structural transformation as has occurred in other regions. Housing stocks, along with investment and employment in related construction and finance industries, constitute a major component of national economic wealth. The key challenge for African cities, however, has been the comparatively low growth in per‐capita income, which limits the resources that households have to consume or invest in housing. At the same time across the region, the formal channels through which quality housing is produced and financed face major constraints that limit access to a large share of urban households. Hence, the formal housing sector is only a small part of the economy because the construction and finance services have very little effective demand, evidenced by the lack of formal investment in housing across the region. Recent studies have found that in Africa, formal housing investment (in national current accounts data) lags behind urbanization by nine years (Dasgupta et al. 2014). Furthermore, the capital investment in infrastructure needed to handle rapid urbanization typically happens (if at all) after housing has already been built, often in informal settlements.
The Country Opinion Survey in Albania assists the World Bank Group (WBG) in gaining a better understanding of how stakeholders in Albania perceive the WBG. It provides the WBG with systematic feedback from national and local governments, multilateral/bilateral agencies, media, academia, the private sector, and civil society in Albania on 1) their views regarding the general environment in Albania; 2) their overall attitudes toward the WBG in Albania; 3) overall impressions of the WBGs effectiveness and results, knowledge work and activities, and communication and information sharing in Albania; and 4) their perceptions of the WBGs future role in Albania.
In recognition of the important role that professional accountancy organizations (PAOs) can play in furthering the principles of aid effectiveness embodied in the Paris Declaration, Accra Agenda for Action, and the Busan Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation, the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) and twelve donor organizations signed the Memorandum of Understanding to Strengthen Accountancy and Improve Collaboration (MOSAIC). MOSAIC's objective is to increase the capacity of PAOs in partner countries to improve the quality of public and private sector accountancy and financial management with a view toward enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of donor assistance, enhancing economic growth, and reducing poverty.
In recognition of the important role that professional accountancy organizations (PAOs) can play in furthering the principles of aid effectiveness embodied in the Paris Declaration, Accra Agenda for Action, and the Busan Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation, the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) and twelve donor organizations signed the Memorandum of Understanding to Strengthen Accountancy and Improve Collaboration (MOSAIC). MOSAIC's objective is to increase the capacity of PAOs in partner countries to improve the quality of public and private sector accountancy and financial management with a view toward enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of donor assistance, enhancing economic growth, and reducing poverty.
The main purpose of the South Africa Report on the Observance of Standards and Codes, Accounting and Auditing (ROSC A&A) is to determine reforms that will continue to improve the quality of financial reporting in South Africa. The review, requested by the Minister of Finance, was conducted to assess the status of implementation of policy recommendations in the prior 2003 ROSC A&A report, assess the institutional framework underpinning accounting and auditing practices in comparison with international standards and good practices in order to identify any emerging issues that require strengthening, share good practices adopted in the country, and propose policy recommendations addressing areas that require improvements. Implementation of the policy recommendations will further enhance the quality of financial reporting in the country, a key pillar that contributes to enhancing the business environment and advancement of governance and financial accountability in both the private and public sector entities. The review focuses on private sector. Financial reporting in public sector is assessed under public expenditure and financial accountability framework.
The aim of this technical note is to shed some light on relationship between labor market institutions and labor market outcomes in the member states of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in North America and East Asia; the New Member States of the European Union who are not members of the OECD (e.g. the Baltic states); countries in the European "Neighborhood" with aspire to accede to the EU (e.g. countries in the Western Balkans); and other European transitions countries (e.g. Ukraine, Moldova, and the Caucasus). Several estimation approaches for different data samples and explanatory variables were used to analyze the impact of labor market institutions on the labor market outcomes in European and OECD countries. This technical note, nevertheless, analyzes the impact of labor market institutions in above-mentioned regions and finds that they do affect major labor market indicators. The results show that the minimum wage tends to increase unemployment in non-European OECD sample, which is in accordance with the text-book pricing out effect. To examine the potential differences in the role of explanatory variables between the two OECD sub-samples the author applied modified Chow tests.The results of applied Chow tests examining the potential differences in the role of explanatory variables between the particular sub-samples are inconclusive. Generally, the author was not able to reject the hypothesis of stability of regression coefficients between the examined groups of countries in all tested models. While some of the estimated coefficients suggest different behavior, the available data did not allow to study this issue in detail.
Operational risk is defined as the risk of loss resulting from inadequate or failed internal processes, people and systems or from external events. In debt management operations, the categories of risks, such as market risk, credit risk, refinancing risk and liquidity risk, are relatively well known; however operational risk is not. The area has not been given due attention to by government debt managers in developing a risk management framework. A similar conclusion on aspects pertaining to operational risk management is borne out from the early results of the World Bank's assessments using its government Debt Management Performance Assessment (DeMPA) tool. This paper thus, introduces the concepts of operational risk as applied to government debt management (DeM) and attempts to present a framework for debt managers to manage operational risks while undertaking public debt management operations. It draws on existing literature for operational risk management principles and practices that have been formulated by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations (COSO) and the findings of the DeMPAs.
The Bretton Woods sisters, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (henceforth the World Bank) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), were set up in 1944. The original purpose of the former was to help post-Second World War reconstruction; the purpose of the latter was to help revive global trade while averting the 'beggar-thy-neighbor' exchange rate policies that characterized the interwar years. Over the years, the World Bank has refocused on helping poor countries grow while the IMF broadly attempts to foster country policies that ensure macroeconomic stability and limit adverse spillovers to the rest of the world. While these roles still remain, their nature has changed somewhat. In particular, given the development of financial markets around the world, the primary role of these institutions has moved to shaping, guiding, supplementing, and stabilizing the flow of private finance rather than substituting fully for it. This paper focuses on the new ways multilateral institutions may have to perform old tasks, as well as the ways they could perform new tasks such as slowing climate change. Critical to their transformation will be the attitudes of the countries that play the largest role in their governance, as well as reform of the governance process itself.
This article is motivated by the remarkable observation that children of land-rich households are often more likely to be in work than the children of land-poor households. The vast majority of working children in developing economies are in agricultural work, predominantly on farms operated by their families. Land is the most important store of wealth in agrarian societies, and it is typically distributed very unequally. These facts challenge the common presumption that child labor emerges from the poorest households. This article suggests that this apparent paradox can be explained by failures of the markets for labor and land. Credit market failure will tend to weaken the force of this paradox. These effects are modeled and estimates obtained using survey data from rural Pakistan and Ghana. The main result is that the wealth paradox persists for girls in both countries, whereas for boys it disappears after conditioning on other covariates.
Albania provides a small amount of social assistance to nearly 20 percent of its population through a system that allows some community discretion in determining distribution. This study investigates how well this social assistance program is targeted to the poor. Relative to other safety net programs in low-income countries, social assistance in Albania is fairly well targeted. Nevertheless, the system is hampered by the absence of a clear, objective criterion to determine the size of the grants from the central government to communes as well as limited information that could be used to implement this criterion. Substantial gains in targeting could be achieved if the central government better allocated transfers to local governments, even holding local targeting at base levels.
The paper begins with a broad overview of shadow prices emphasizing their close relationship with the policy environment. This is followed by the description of an analytical framework which integrates shadow prices and policies. The analytical framework is then used to highlight some of the major project evaluation shadow pricing rules. The interrelationship between project investment and public policy reforms emerges from this discussion. The paper ends with a description of some major research issues that need to be considered in assessing public choice between project investment and policy reforms. This agenda for research will help in determining whether the approach described in the paper can be operationalized in terms of quantification and measurement. While the main thrust of the paper is on the analytical aspects, a brief review of actual practice provides the interface with the analytics in indicating the research agenda.
The paper begins with a broad overview of shadow prices emphasizing their close relationship with the policy environment. This is followed by the description of an analytical framework which integrates shadow prices and policies. The analytical framework is then used to highlight some of the major project evaluation shadow pricing rules. The interrelationship between project investment and public policy reforms emerges from this discussion. The paper ends with a description of some major research issues that need to be considered in assessing public choice between project investment and policy reforms. This agenda for research will help in determining whether the approach described in the paper can be operationalized in terms of quantification and measurement. While the main thrust of the paper is on the analytical aspects, a brief review of actual practice provides the interface with the analytics in indicating the research agenda.
