Böcker i International development in focus-serien

Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula faces growing risks from environmental hazards. Oil spills, hurricanes, coral bleaching, extreme flooding, and erosion have all been experienced over the past decade. This report explores selected topics that aim to inform decision-making in the region.

Presents key activities, promising practices, and lessons learned from the World Bank Tuberculosis in the Mining Sector Initiative - a multisectoral, multicountry, public-private regional initiative in southern Africa. It examines how ministries, sectors, and partners have been brought together to address the epidemic's varied dimensions.

The benefits of including work-based learning (WBL) as part of vocational education and training (VET) are widely recognized. But little is known about how school-based systems can best incorporate WBL. This report provides recommendations and international examples for expanding the use of WBL in VET.

Brazil approaches its 2018 election with an economy that is gradually recovering from the deepest recession in its recent economic history. This book explores the drivers of future employment and income growth. Its key finding: Brazil needs to dramatically improve its performance across all industries if the country is to provide better jobs.

This book is motivated by the need to understand the possible drivers of future income and employment growth. Its key finding: Brazil needs to dramatically improve its performance in terms of productivity if the country is to generate lasting gains in incomes and provide better jobs for its citizens.

Brings together public financial management and public sector reform experiences from eight countries in East Asia. This book examines how reforms have been implemented in those countries and explores key lessons that can help reformers to further advance their endeavors.

With growing global water scarcity and projections that indicate the need to increase both agricultural production and agricultural water use, it is increasingly advocated to focus efforts on improving agricultural water productivity and efficiency - and thus achieve more crop per drop.

Focuses on the challenge of youth engagement in school and at work. This report shows that youth prospects in the labor market are dimmed by policies favoring existing workers. Also, youth are often ill equipped to meet an increasingly challenging labor market. It discusses new policies, targeted at youth, that Brazil could prioritize.

Offers a practical exploration of the three interdependent dimensions of trade connectivity in the Mediterranean: maritime networks, port efficiency, and hinterland connectivity. Understanding how trade connectivity works is important to policy makers concerned with the economic benefits of large investments in infrastructure.

Vietnam stands out as one of the most dynamic emerging countries in the East Asia and Pacific region. Since major reforms in the 1990s, the country has experienced an annual average growth rate of 6-7 percent, and extreme poverty rate has fallen from over 50 percent to 3 percent. Yet, the rapid growth and decentralization process have brought significant pressure on provincial governments in terms of local infrastructure investments and urban services delivery.With an annual shortfall of US$9 billion in funding for local infrastructure investments, provincial governments in Vietnam need to move toward a more market-driven financing model. This transition will require enhanced financial and technical capacity of local governments as well as an enabling environment for subnational borrowing.This report explores the development of a pilot financial instrument that could catalyze the subnational borrowing market in Vietnam. The report presents the findings of three assessments, which focused on (a) the borrowing capacity and creditworthiness of selected provincial governments, (b) the capacity of the commercial banking sector to invest in provincial governments, and (c) the current status of Vietnam's regulatory framework. The findings of this report will be useful to policy makers in Vietnam, providing an understanding of the key issues associated with a shift toward a more affordable and efficient local infrastructure financing model and presenting a preliminary roadmap for development of a pilot instrument. The report will also be of interest to policy makers in other transition countries that are facing similar challenges.

Liberia has been influenced by the Ebola crisis since 2014, but the economy is now recovering quickly. Still, significant challenges lie ahead. Agriculture, an important sector that employs approximately half of the labor force, still has a weak growth trajectory. Many rural people are not well connected to markets and live below the poverty line. To use limited resources effectively, strategic planning and prioritization of public investment are essential. Particularly, the Ebola crisis revealed the vulnerability of the country's transport connectivity and health systems. This book analyzes the country's transport connectivity, identifying the existing bottlenecks and possible economic potentials. By taking advantage of the country's first-ever georeferenced road network data, the analysis casts light on various aspects of connectivity, such as rural accessibility, market access, access to port and health facilities and multimodal connectivity, including cabotage. It is shown that transport connectivity is crucial to increasing agricultural production, stimulating agglomeration economies, and supporting people's access to health care services. Significant resources are likely to be required to meet the existing gap. The book estimates the financial needs by development objective and discusses important policy issues, including the possibility of public-private partnerships to finance transport infrastructure.

Promoting the smooth labor market integration and early labor market success of workers has increasingly become an important economic and social development aim globally. The Nepal government sees addressing the social and economic challenges of youth, and leveraging their social and economic prospects, as critical for the country’s economic growth and development. There has been limited systematic, policy-oriented empirical research conducted on labor and livelihoods in Nepal. Dedicated examinations of the labor conditions, behaviors, and outcomes of youth are rarer still. Responding to the knowledge needs expressed by the Nepal government and other stakeholders in the country, this book aims to improve our understanding of the labor market conditions, behaviors, and outcomes of Nepalese youth. It examines these aspects in Nepal’s domestic labor market as well as in relation to labor migration to India and other countries, including temporary 'foreign employment' of Nepalese workers under bilateral labor agreements between destination countries and Nepal. In so doing, the report seeks to present insights and implications for research and public policy, with the goal of improving the labor market prospects of Nepalese youth. The collective findings in the report point to three directions for orienting public policy and program initiatives. First is raising rural labor productivity, urban labor demand, and urban worker†“job matching efficiency. Second is supporting the labor market integration of rural youth migrating to urban parts of Nepal and of youth labor migrants returning from India and other countries. Third is improving the orientation and efficacy of labor skill training.

Integration into global markets can improve the efficiency of the Argentinian economy, providing opportunities for private investment to flourish and for the associated benefits to accrue to consumers. Among many policies that are important for integrating into the global economy, particularly relevant are trade, investment, and competition policies. They all share a common attribute: the capacity to shape the incentives of firms to improve resource allocation and to strengthen productivity while integrating into international markets. Once properly combined, investment, trade, and competition polices have mutually reinforcing relationships in the sense that growth dividends stemming from reforms in one policy area are reinforced when properly combined with reforms in the other two. Against this backdrop, this report follows a three-pronged approach. It presents a set of robust empirical analyses †“ drawing from both general and partial equilibrium exercises - to assess the potential impacts from trade, competition, and investment policy reforms. It offers a new comparative review of international experience with structural microeconomic reform programs to bring insights for Argentina’s design and sequencing of such reforms. Finally, it presents individual reform recommendations for each institution in charge of the three respective policy areas in an integrated step-by-step framework from the firm perspective to illustrate the critical challenges to investment and internationalization for Argentinian firms.

The agriculture sector can play an important role in poverty reduction and sustained growth in Afghanistan, primarily through productive and inclusive job creation. Using an "agricultural jobs lens" and multidimensional approach, this report explores the sector's direct and indirect roles in explaining the dynamics of rural employment.