The Country Policy and Institutional
Assessment (CPIA) Africa report describes the progress
African countries are making on strengthening the quality of
their policies and institutions. Some of the results from
this report include: The overall quality of policies and
institutions in countries in Sub-Saharan Africa was
unchanged in 2014, but there was much variation in
performance across countries. More than half the countries

This Systematic Country Diagnostic (SCD)
covers eight small Pacific island countries (PIC8):
Kiribati, Marshall Islands, the Federated States of
Micronesia, Palau, Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu. The
objective of the SCD is to identify the most critical
constraints and opportunities facing the PIC8 to meet the
global goals of ending absolute poverty and boosting shared
prosperity in a sustainable manner. The report is intended

Situated in a fertile low-lying river
delta, Bangladesh combines high vulnerability to floods,
tropical cyclones, earthquakes, and climate change with one
of the world’s highest population densities, with around 159
million people living in less than 150,000 sq. km. With the
world’s second lowest per capita income in 1975, it was
labeled ‘the test case for development’ in view of the
formidable development challenges it faced. Nevertheless,

For more than a decade, Africa has enjoyed a mineral boom. is the growth mostly happening in isolated places, sectors and periods? The approach adopted in this study is two-pronged. First, through case studies, including the results of fieldwork, mining’s impacts are examined in a country-specific context for each of three countries, Ghana, Mali, and Tanzania; and second, a statistical analysis is used to test whether the indicators of welfare improve with proximity to a mine.

Between 2002 and 2012-13, most of the
reduction in poverty was due to increased earnings, as
opposed to higher employment or higher transfers. Although
it is hard to be certain, increases in earnings are
associated with: (i) a slow structural transformation away
from agriculture and into industry and services that led to
productivity increases; (ii) agglomeration around key urban
areas that supported this structural transformation; (iii)

After several years of strong economic
performance, Zambia now confronts several important
challenges that must be managed carefully to ensure
sustained and inclusive growth in the future. On the one
hand, the economy grew by an estimated 5.5–6.0 percent in
2014, somewhat above the average for African economies.
Monthly copper production increased by an average of 8
percent during the second half of 2014, reversing the sharp

Sustainable development goals (SDGs)
placed access to basic services at the center of
international development in 2016-2030. Out of 17 goals,
five address the access of poor people to basic services: to
health in SDG3, to education in SDG4, and SDG5, to water and
sanitation in SDG6, to energy in SDG7, and to urban services
in SDG11. The mutually reinforcing relationship between
electricity access, economic development, and poverty

Seventy years after independence and
more than a decade of political and institutional reforms,
Indonesia has emerged as a stable democracy. Indonesia’s
achievements are now under stress, with a slowdown in its
commodity driven economy, stagnant rates of poverty
reduction, and rapidly rising inequality. The development
policy review, completed in 2014, and the systematic country
diagnostic (SCD), completed in 2015, explain the limited

During the past decade, Georgia’s
pursuit of economic reforms led to impressive economic
growth, capital inflow, and investments. It helped improve
the business environment and infrastructure, strengthened
public finances, and liberalized trade. Georgia achieved
most of the human development targets of the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs). This progress did not result,
however, in improved environmental governance or better

This Country Partnership Framework (CPF)
presents the World Bank Group (WBG) program and the
associated results framework for Lebanon for the period
FY17-FY22. In a fragile and conflict-prone environment, this
CPF aims at mitigating the immediate, and potentially
long-lasting impact of the Syria crisis on Lebanon, while
strengthening state institutions, addressing existing
vulnerabilities, and bolstering efforts on longer term

This document details the scope and the
main elements of the Country Partnership Framework (CPF)
with the Republic of Botswana for FY16-20. The previous
Country Partnership Strategy (CPS), considered by the Board
on May 21, 2009 and completed in 2013 has built a solid
foundation to design the new World Bank Group (WBG) program.
The CPF supports the government’s ongoing National
Development Plan (NDP10) that has recently been extended

Natural resources offer opportunities,
but also bring challenges. They have generally been linked
to a series of negative outcomes like economic decline,
corruption, and conflict. Oil and minerals reserves, in
particular, are often very spatially concentrated, and their
discovery becomes a potential source of conflict between the
governments, the people of the producing areas, and those of
the rest of the country. But can this increased risk of