Policy makers and regulators have
devoted much effort to reforms aimed at improving financial
stability in response to lessons from the 2007-09 crisis. At
the same time, much effort has also been directed to
promoting greater financial inclusion as an enabler of equal
opportunity. To some extent, these endeavors have been
exerted in silos, neglecting the possibility that financial
inclusion and financial stability could be significantly

In a five-month period, man-made fire cost Indonesia $16.1 billion or 2 percent of GDP in 2015. An estimated 2.6 million hectares – an area four times the size of Bali – burned. While the 2015 fires were some of the worst in recent years (in part as a result of el Nino), they are by no means a singular event. Wide-scale fire crises occur annually in Indonesia. Indonesia’s fire story is not just one of loss and damage; fires contribute to significant economic upside for a diverse, if concentrated, group of actors.

Shifting Kenya’s private sector into
higher gear: a trade and competitiveness agenda’ was born
out of the World Bank’s Trade and Competitiveness (T&C)
Global Practice recent stock taking of its work in Kenya.
This was part of a Programmatic Approach that aimed to
organize T&C’s knowledge, advisory, and convening
services to address Kenya’s development challenges in the
private sector space. By Sub-Saharan African standards,

This paper addresses the question
whether and how co-benefits, through disaster resilience
building, can be further promoted. Co-benefits are defined
as positive externalities that arise deliberately as a
result of a joint strategy that pursues several objectives
synergistically at the same time, such as disaster risk
management and development goals, or disaster risk
management and climate change adaptation. Of particular

Bleak short-term economic outlook raises the risk that social and environmental
achievements may not be sustained. The changed economic circumstances have exposed shortcomings in Brazil’s development model, epitomized by the struggle to achieve a sustainable fiscal policy. Against this background, some Brazilians are now asking whether the gains of the past decade might have been an illusion, created by the commodity boom, but unsustainable in today’s less forgiving international environment. Brazil thus finds itself at an important juncture and, to a certain extent, the policy

Since 2013 The World Bank Group has
partnered with the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction
and Recovery and the U.K. Department for International
Development to address some of these gaps in evidence and
methodologies. The Disaster Risk Finance Impact Analytics
Project has made significant contributions to the
understanding of how to monitor and evaluate existing or
potential investments in disaster risk finance from a

The growing awareness about the need to anticipate the future of land systems focuses on how well we understand the interactions between society and environmental processes within a complexity framework. A major barrier to understanding is insufficient attention given to long (multidecadal) temporal perspectives on complex system behavior that can provide insights through both analog and evolutionary approaches. Analogs are useful in generating typologies of generic system behavior, whereas evolutionary assessments provide insight into site-specific system properties.

This paper examines the spatial
organization of jobs in Kampala, the capital city of Uganda,
and applies the Lucas and Rossi-Hansberg (2002) model to
explain the observed patterns in terms of the agglomeration
forces and the commuting costs of workers. The paper
suggests that: (i) Economic activities are concentrated in
the downtown -- beyond which employment is spatially
dispersed. (ii) Geographically weighted regressions identify

Jordan is an upper middle income country which has proven remarkably resilient despite decades of turmoil in its neighborhood. Even with economic stability in the face of massive shocks, the Jordanian government - reflecting the views of the population - has made clear the need for improvement in the current growth trajectory. Public dissatisfaction coalesced around a perception, which the government acknowledges, that previous reform efforts had struggled with implementation, while discretionary decisions and unequal opportunities remain entrenched.

Governments must decide how to allocate
limited resources for infrastructure development,
particularly since financing gaps have been projected for
the coming decades. Social cost-benefit analysis provides
sound project appraisal and, when systematically applied, a
basis for prioritization. In some instances, however,
capacity and resource limitations make extensive economic
analyses across all projects unfeasible in the immediate

The urban land policy reforms implemented in Peru since 1996 aimed at the creation of a system able to assure formal rights to real property in large urban settlements. This case study looks at the factors that motivated reform, how the reform process itself was managed, the results, and lessons learned.

West Africa’s coastal area is critical
to the region, home to a third of its people and the source
of about half of its gross domestic product (GDP). Because
most of it is composed of mangroves and sand formations, the
area’s coastline is also highly vulnerable to erosion caused
by coastal currents and storm surges. Erosion is evident
from Mauritania to Gabon - and the rates of erosion are
increasing. Around the port of Lome, for example, Togo’s