Governments and civil society have come together in recent years to increase the transparency of business information. New regulations have been adopted to improve transparency, particularly regarding the dissemination of company data.
... See More + These changes have been made in the wake of a series of revelations - such as the Panama papers and the Bahamas leaks - that showed the extent to which individuals take advantage of obscure company ownership structures to illicitly move money around the globe. There is now strong momentum behind expanding access to corporate information, including company ownership. The transparency of the information provided by the business registry plays a vital role in an economy. This case study has shown that the public availability of information on company ownership and starting a business is associated with an increase in an economy’s overall level of transparency, an increase in the efficiency of business registration, and a decrease in bribery.
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Bolivia’s primary natural hazards - such as droughts, frost, severe rains, and hailstorms - are largely hydrometeorological in nature, and include phenomena derived from these, such as floods and landslides.
... See More + Given their frequency and the proportion of the population exposed to them, floods cause significant economic losses primarily affecting infrastructure, agricultural, and livestock production. Given this context, disaster risk management has been a priority in the agenda of the Government of Bolivia, which has achieved significant progress in establishing a regulatory and institutional framework for this purpose. This study analyzes various indexes commonly used in economic literature to represent flood impacts. The results show that different indexes are consistent across the different characterizations, and point to a significant negative effect of excessive precipitation, intense rainfall, and river overflow, on both per capita income and household poverty. The study is divided into four sections. The first section describes the three indexes used in the study, the information used to calibrate them, and how their values are calculated. The second section describes the methodology used to assess floods imparts on household income and poverty. The third section describes the results for different variants of the indexes and includes a comparison of the predictions of each in different scenarios. The last section shows the main conclusions of the study.
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This first in a series of two Fiscal and Financial Sector Resilience Policy-Based Guarantees (PBG) to Montenegro of EUR 80 million supports reforms to strengthen public finance sustainability and financial sector resilience.
... See More + The operation supports a package of reforms that aims to stabilize public debt levels, boost investor confidence, mitigate the impacts of fiscal consolidation on the most vulnerable, and strengthen macro-financial supervision. This DFP/PBG program supports reforms to safeguard fiscal sustainability and make the financial sector more resilient to potential shocks. These reforms are consistent with the government’s Fiscal Strategy 2017-2020 and the Economic Reform Program for 2017-2019 as outlined above. The operation is the first one in a series of two programmatic loans organized under two pillars (i) strengthening fiscal sustainability; and (ii) strengthening financial sector resilience, that underpin and inform the government reform agenda. The reforms supported by this operation enjoy coordinated support from the EC, the IMF and the World Bank, including with targeted TA.
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A massive landslide in the Western Area Rural of Sierra Leone on August 14, 2017, slipped into the Babadorie River Valley and exacerbated existing flooding in the Western Area Rural and Urban (Freetown), affecting about 6,000 people of which 1,141 have been declared dead or missing.
... See More + Following three days of intense rainfall, a mountain valley side slope in the Regent area below Sugar Loaf, the highest peak in the north of the Western Area Peninsula, collapsed and caused a major landslide. The damage and loss caused by the landslide and subsequent debris flow along the Babadorie River Valley differed significantly from that caused by the flooding in other valleys across Freetown City. Damage impact also varied by geography, with lower income settlements being at the recipient end of the floods. The government of Sierra Leone requested the World Bank’s support to conduct a comprehensive rapid Damage and Loss Assessment (DaLA), in partnership with the United Nations (UN). The DaLA was carried out with the objective of estimating damages and losses and of making preliminary estimations for mobilizing funds and launching immediate recovery. The assessment covers ten sectors, four cross-cutting areas, and preliminary recommendations for immediate, medium-, and long-term needs. This DaLA is a living document and, as such, is subject to revisions as additional data become available. The report has sought to outline what is desirable and what is possible.
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The Ganges Basin in South Asia is home to some of the world's poorest and most vulnerable communities. Impacted by catastrophic annual floods, the region is recognized as highly disaster prone, causing widespread human suffering and economic losses.
... See More + In recognition of these challenges, many groups are actively and cooperatively engaged in reducing South Asia's vulnerability to flooding. As a contribution to these efforts, the World Bank recently commissioned specialist teams to assess and map flood risk across the Ganges River basin and to design and evaluate flood forecasting tools for the greater Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna basin. Flood Risk Assessment and Forecasting for the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna River Basins summarizes the technical findings, includes highlights of the work, and links to the full technical reports and new interactive online resources. The report provides, for the first time, a numbers-based view of the impacts of floods of different severities across the Ganges basin, helping identify priority areas for addressing flood risks (for example, relocating levees, improving flood warning systems, and boosting overall economic resilience). This report on the flood forecasting system provides probability-based flood forecasts for more than 85 Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna basin locations along with near-real-time data maps of rainfall (predicted and actual) and river levels.
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The development objective of the Metro Manila Flood Management Project for Philippines is to improve flood management in selected areas of metro manila.
... See More + The project comprises of four components. The first component, modernizing drainage areas will construct an estimated 20 new and modernize an estimated 36 existing pumping stations and appurtenant infrastructure, improve the associated waterways and drainage channels, including secondary and tertiary ones as needed, and develop new drains when required. The second component, minimizing solid waste in waterways will carry out neighborhood-level activities near the pumping stations and waterways and drainage channels targeted under component 1 of the project. The third component, participatory housing and resettlement will support three groups of project affected people. Group 1 refers to project affected people (PAPs) who were resettled before December 8, 2014 (the date of the announcement of the project identification mission). Group 2 refers to PAPs that were resettled from technical footprints from December 8, 2014 to project effectiveness. Group 3 refers to PAPs that will be resettled from technical footprints after project effectiveness. The fourth component, project management and coordination will provide support for the operation of the project management offices in department of public works and highways (DPWH) and metropolitan manila development authority (MMDA) with respect to the management and coordination of their respective parts of the project.
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The development objective of the Emergency Flood Disaster Reconstruction Project for Vietnam is to support the government in overcoming long-term natural disasters through reconstruction of prioritized infrastructures in some flood-damaged provinces in 2016 and through capacity building for efficient response to natural disasters in the coming years.
... See More + Some of the negative impacts and mitigation measures are include : (i) inform people concerning construction schedule in advance so that they could actively select crop varieties that have growth duration suitable to the construction schedule; (ii) raising community awareness of traffic safety and social evils prevention during the construction period; (iii) to ensure the environmental sanitation during the transportation of materials as well as provisions for offsets when infrastructure damaged; and (iv) to comply with the contract provisions on the load and the measures to ensure the environmental sanitation during the transportation of materials as well as provisions for offsets when infrastructure damaged.
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