Effective environmental and social risk
management in development policy financing (DPF) is central
to achieving the World Bank’s goals of ending extreme
poverty and promoting shared prosperity in a sustainable
manner. If the World Bank is supporting far-reaching member
country reforms that are intended to contribute to the twin
goals, then it should seek to understand the impact of those
reforms on the poor. It should also ensure that the

Correspondent banking services are
essential to enabling companies and individuals to transact
internationally and make cross-border payments. Recently
there have been indications that certain large international
banks have started terminating or severely limiting their
correspondent banking relationships with smaller local and
regional banks from jurisdictions around the world. To find
out whether this is indeed happening, the World Bank, with

Launched in 2011, the Second Sustainable
and Participatory Energy Management Project (PROGEDE II) for
Senegal has been hailed for effectively mainstreaming a
gender perspective into an energy project. Under the
project, women have participated more in decision making;
developed skills in technical production, entrepreneurship,
and organizational management; and benefitted from increased incomes.

The objective of this Systematic Country
Diagnostic (SCD) is to identify the priority constraints
Bolivia faces in sustaining its gains on reducing poverty
and enhancing shared prosperity over the next years. It will
analyze the dynamics behind the progress achieved in the
past decade on inclusive growth, and identify a number of
key constraints for sustaining and consolidating this
progress. The SCD begins, in Chapter two, with a

Mauritius has been a success story since
independence, moving from low income to uppermiddle-income
status. Close public-private partnerships facilitated
private sector-led growth in astable macroeconomic and
institutional environment. The government implemented an
activeindustrial policy to support private sector
competitiveness while exploiting global trade nichescreated
by preferential access arrangements. As a result, savings

The main objective of this Economic and Sector Work (ESW) is to identify opportunities for stronger linkages between domestic agricultural supply chains and the tourism sector in the OECS, and to outline priority interventions with potential to strengthen these linkages. Since this topic has been analyzed in a number of studies, the approach for this ESW is not to conduct yet another comprehensive study.

A rainforest can be modeled as a dynamic
asset subject to various risks, including risk of fire. Any
small part of the forest can be in one of two states: either
untouched by forest fire, or already damaged by fire, in
which case there is both a local forest loss and increased
dryness over a broader area. In this paper, two Bellman
equations are constructed, one for unharmed forest and a
second for already burnt forest. The analysis solves the two

The major role tropical forests play in
biodiversity and climate change has led the world to search
for effective ways to slow down deforestation. Community
forest management (CFM) is an example of the broader concept
of community-based natural resources management (CBNRM). As
part of the decentralization policy in many countries,
mainly in Africa and Asia, CFM was expected to promote: (i)
a more effective stewardship of the resources by involving

The lessons learned from the
implications of the global crisis for the Armenian economy
led the Government of Armenia to refine its approach to
economic development policy. The business environment, the
market structure, and the incentive pattern had not fostered
reallocation of resources into more productive areas or the
emergence of internationally competitive products and
services. Despite numerous initiatives and multiple efforts,

The effects of climate change, from
changing precipitation patterns to rising seas, will
exacerbate the coastal erosion already affecting West
Africa, increasing the exposure and vulnerability of the
people and assets located there. Given the importance of the
coastal zone to the region as a whole, it is critical that
policy makers consider the effects of future climate change
in the decisions they make today. Regional cooperation is

Colombia has made impressive strides in
reducing poverty and promoting shared prosperity during the
last decade. Extreme poverty fell from 17.7 percent in 2002
to 8.1 percent in 2014, while total poverty (including
moderate poverty) fell from 49.7 percent in 2002 to 29.5
percent in 2014. The decline implies that 6.2 million people
left poverty in the period. The multidimensional poverty
rate, which takes into account education, health, labor,

Motivated by the emphasis on secure property rights as a determinant of economic development in recent literature, we use village- and household-level information from about 800 villages throughout China to explore whether legal reform increased protection of land rights against unauthorized reallocation or expropriation with below-average compensation by the state.