The World Bank funded the present study, Tunisia water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) poverty diagnostics, to assist the Government of Tunisia with exploring the linkages between poverty and WASH services.
... See More + The study in Tunisia was carried out as part of global WASH poverty diagnostics, which took place simultaneously in 18 countries, with varying areas of emphasis and depth. The water sector is also a priority for World Bank support in Tunisia. The present phase 3 report presents a synthesis of the findings from both phase 1 and phase 2, summarizing key analytical conclusions and drawing together recommendations focused on policy reforms, including to improve the present allocation of financing and leverage additional financing. In addition, inadequate access to WASH services is a marker of poverty. In most countries there is strong correlation between the two, and analysts of multi-dimensional poverty use WASH services as one indicator in their composite index. The present report is structured as follows: section one gives introduction. Section two provides a brief overview of the water resources and WASH context in Tunisia; section three explores the linkages between WASH services and poverty; section four summarizes the main findings from the analysis of financial flows; and section five provides recommendations to improve WASH services and financing.
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The most recent poverty assessment for Belarus was undertaken over a decade ago, and covers the period through 2002. The report highlighted several salient patterns of poverty in Belarus, including: (i) the much lower incidence of poverty in the capital city of Minsk; (ii) strong links between poverty and educational attainment; and (iii) higher poverty risk among collective farmers and pensioners, as well as highlighting the notable pay differences among men and women.
... See More + The poverty assessment also highlighted several dimensions of fragility with respect to the poverty reduction gains in Belarus, including unsustainable increases in real wages in excess of productivity; as well as Russian subsidies, particularly for imported natural gas - an input for utility companies. The purpose of this paper is to provide a first comprehensive update of poverty, inequality, and shared prosperity trends - and key drivers of these trends - over the past decade, starting with the end of the most recent poverty assessment, that is to focus on the period 2003 - 2015. The paper also provides a first detailed look into the evolution of the shared prosperity indicator (that is, the growth of expenditures of the bottom 40 percent) and the evolution of the profile of the bottom 40 percent of the population over the same period, to assess whether the underlying characteristics of the population either below the poverty line or vulnerable to poverty changed in notable ways over the past decade. The paper is structured as follows: section one gives introduction, section two provides a brief overview of macroeconomic developments over the past decade in order to put the track record of poverty, inequality, and shared prosperity into a broader economic context. Section three presents an overview of poverty, inequality, and shared prosperity dynamics during the 2003-2015 period. Section four looks in more details at the key factors that contributed to the poverty and shared prosperity dynamics described in section three. Section five outlines several challenges to sustaining shared prosperity in the future. Section six concludes.
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Ratings of First, Second and Third Poverty Reduction Support Credit Project for Cote d'Ivoire were as follows: outcomes were moderately unsatisfactory, risk to development outcome was high, Bank performance was moderately unsatisfactory, and Borrower performance was moderately unsatisfactory.
... See More + Some of the lessons learned included: (i) The trade-off between reform and disbursement objectives needs to be acknowledged; (ii) A programmatic sequence of reforms is helpful to ensure proper implementation for any one sector or issue; (iii) Triggers should be agreed with enough advance notice to allow the authorities to ensure smooth implementation; (iv) If sensitive sectors are going to be addressed, as they probably should, attention needs to be paid to risks of policy reversal; and (v) Greater care should be taken to define results indicators and targets.
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Implementation Completion and Results Report ICR3959 JUN 20, 2017
Multidimensional poverty comparisons can be sensitive to the choice of welfare indicators, the weights assigned to the indicators, as well as the aggregate poverty measure used.
... See More + This paper examines the robustness of trends in multidimensional poverty in the Philippines to these choices by presenting estimates for three alternative weighting schemes and three measures of multidimensional poverty. The weighting schemes range from uniform weights similar to those used in the global multidimensional poverty indexes produced by the United Nations Development Programme, to weights based on inverse incidence of different deprivations and those derived from the estimated relationship of deprivations to a survey-based measure of subjective welfare. The multidimensional poverty measures similarly range from the "dual cut-off" indexes analogous to the United Nations Development Programme's global Multidimensional Poverty Index, to “union-based” indexes that count all deprivations, to indexes that are also responsive to the distribution of deprivations. Using data for 2004-13, the paper finds evidence of a significant decline in multidimensional poverty that is robust to these alternatives, although the magnitude of the decline in, and especially the dimensional contributions to, aggregate multidimensional poverty are quite sensitive to the alternatives considered.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8099 JUN 09, 2017
The objective of the National Targeted Programs for New Rural Development and Sustainable Poverty Reduction Support Program (NTPSP) Program-for-Results Project for Vietnam is to improve the delivery of, and access to, investments for increasing agricultural production and enhancing livelihood opportunities within the Program area.
... See More + For the last decade, Vietnam has experienced relatively strong economic growth, with GDP growing at an annual average of around 6.3 percent leading to Vietnam’s graduation into a middle-income country. High growth has been accompanied by rapid urbanization, a rising middle class together with improved access to social and economic benefits and services. The concentration of poverty in Vietnam in rural areas, among ethnic minorities and midland and mountainous areas partly reflect low access to economic opportunities due to low economic integration. Vietnam has achieved impressive gains in many dimensions of gender equality, but the situation for ethnic minority women remains a development challenge. The EM women overall have lower literacy and less working knowledge of Vietnamese language. The burden of low access to water, health services and roads as well as poor child nutrition, falls disproportionately on them as they are primarily responsible for collecting water and taking care of family health. Their active participation in prioritization of social-economic infrastructure and livelihoods options is central to improving their wellbeing. Environmental degradation coupled with vulnerability to the impact of extreme weather events and global climate change are major threats to the short, medium and long-term sustainability of the country’s development. The country is projected to be subjected to more heat stress as its mean temperature and the incidence of hot days are expected to further increase. Higher variability and risks in extreme precipitation as well as higher wind speeds are also projected, thereby increasing exposure and risk of typhoons and flooding in coastal and deltaic areas as well as flashfloods and mudslides in mountainous and hilly areas. Future sea level rise would also expose coastal areas to more storm surges. Nevertheless, these challenges, especially for rural areas, are well understood by the Government, as reflected in the recent Vietnam 2035 report jointly prepared with the World Bank Group. The government is committed to support not only initiatives towards climate resilient agriculture or environment-friendly agriculture and/or livelihoods but to also adapt rural infrastructure quality specifications to address climate variability issues.
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This document presents the World Bank Group (WBG) Country Partnership Framework (CPF) withthe Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) for 2017-2021.
... See More + The WBG CPF aims at supportingLasting Accessible Opportunities for all including sustained green growth, improved access to humanand infrastructure services, and opportunities for all. The previous Country Partnership Strategy (CPS)2012-2016 built a solid foundation and a strong relationship with the Government of Lao PDR (GOL). The CPF supports the GOL's 8th National Socio-Economic Development Plan (NSEDP) for2016-2020. The 8th NSEDP introduces policies intended to put Lao PDR on a path to reduce povertyand promote shared prosperity in a sustainable manner, based on green growth principles. Lao PDR'sdevelopment has advanced greatly in the last two decades, although significant challenges remain.Incomes have risen, poverty has declined, access to several key public services has improved and asa result Lao PDR met a number of its Millennium Development Goals. With GDP growth averaging8 percent per year since 2000, Lao PDR today is a lower-middle income country with a GNI percapita of around US$1,740 in 2015. However, growth has been driven mainly by exploitation of itsabundant natural resources and has been less inclusive, resilient, and sustainable than for regional comparators. Widespread malnutrition and overall low consumption levels highlight the challenges that remain for the basic well-being of the country.
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Country Assistance Strategy Document 116234 JUN 01, 2017
This document presents the World Bank Group (WBG) Country Partnership Framework (CPF) withthe Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) for 2017-2021.
... See More + The WBG CPF aims at supportingLasting Accessible Opportunities for all including sustained green growth, improved access to humanand infrastructure services, and opportunities for all. The previous Country Partnership Strategy (CPS)2012-2016 built a solid foundation and a strong relationship with the Government of Lao PDR (GOL). The CPF supports the GOL's 8th National Socio-Economic Development Plan (NSEDP) for2016-2020. The 8th NSEDP introduces policies intended to put Lao PDR on a path to reduce povertyand promote shared prosperity in a sustainable manner, based on green growth principles. Lao PDR'sdevelopment has advanced greatly in the last two decades, although significant challenges remain.Incomes have risen, poverty has declined, access to several key public services has improved and asa result Lao PDR met a number of its Millennium Development Goals. With GDP growth averaging8 percent per year since 2000, Lao PDR today is a lower-middle income country with a GNI percapita of around US$1,740 in 2015. However, growth has been driven mainly by exploitation of itsabundant natural resources and has been less inclusive, resilient, and sustainable than for regional comparators. Widespread malnutrition and overall low consumption levels highlight the challenges that remain for the basic well-being of the country.
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Country Assistance Strategy Document 116234 JUN 01, 2017
This program document presents a supplemental financing to the Third Poverty Reduction Support Development Policy Operation (PRSDPO-III) to the Republic of Liberia in amount of special drawing rights (SDR) 4.8 million in International Development Association (IDA) grants and of SDR4.1 million in International Development Association (IDA) credits, and of United States (U.S.) 4,366,500 dollars in grants from the Liberia forest landscape single donor trust fund.
... See More + At the time the PRSDPO-III was negotiated in October 2016, Liberia’s fledgling economy, already weakened by the adverse economic effects of the Ebola crisis, has been hard hit by severe exogenous shocks from the sustained slump in global commodity prices. Economic and fiscal performance in 2016 and 2017 turned out to be worse than expected as downside risks, highlighted in the PRSDPO-III program document, have materialized.
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Poverty lines are typically higher in richer countries, and lower in poorer ones, reflecting the relative nature of national assessments of who is considered poor.
... See More + In many high-income countries, poverty lines are explicitly relative, set as a share of mean or median income. Despite systematic variation in how countries define poverty, global poverty counts are based on fixed-value lines. To reflect national assessments of poverty in a global headcount of poverty, this paper proposes a societal poverty line. The proposed societal poverty line is derived from 699 harmonized national poverty lines, and has an intercept of $1 per day and a relative gradient of 50 percent of median national income or consumption. The societal poverty line is more closely aligned with national definitions of poverty than other proposed relative lines. By this relative measure, societal poverty has fallen steadily since 1990, but at a much slower pace than absolute extreme poverty.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8073 MAY 23, 2017
The Dominican Republic has enjoyed one of the strongest growth rates in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) over the past 20 years. It also experiences high growth with limited poverty reduction.
... See More + The available evidence strongly supports the role of three distinguishing characteristics of the Dominican economy in explaining why prosperity has not been shared more broadly in a country that does not seem to have a growth problem. With this objective in mind, this book assembles a collection of empirical analyses that explore three complementary hypotheses that could help decipher the puzzle of growth with limited shared prosperity in the Dominican Republic. The analysis of three complementary hypotheses tested in this book yields interesting findings that reveal the complexity of the phenomenon of growth with limited poverty reduction in the Dominican Republic. This book is arranged as follows: (1) Chapter 1 addresses the adequacy of the methodology to measure price variation, focusing on whether the low responsiveness of the poverty rate to the strong, robust level of economic growth recorded by the Dominican Republic during the past decade may be partly explained by a price index that does not reflect differences in consumption patterns across income groups: (2) Chapter 2 examines the role of factor endowments, technology, and capital mobility in job creation, and investigates why in the face of outstanding growth performance, has the Dominican Republic not been able to generate enough formal jobs to absorb its abundant labor force; (3) Chapter 3 considers whether labor market outcomes in the Dominican Republic suffer from capital-biased technical change, providing additional insights into the questions addressed in the previous chapter; (4) Chapter 4 focuses on the wage effects of Haitian migration in the Dominican Republic, delving into the complex, sensitive debate on whether labor market outcomes in the Dominican Republic are affected by migrants from neighboring Haiti; and (5) Chapter 5 considers the labor market implications of immigration and emigration in the Dominican Republic, going one step further in this debate.
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Ethiopia has achieved substantial progress in economic, social, and human development over the past decade. The country partnership framework (CPF) draws on the findings of the World Bank Group (WBG’s) 2016 systematic country diagnostic (SCD) for Ethiopia, which identified eight binding constraints to ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity, along with two overarching challenges: the need for a sustainable financing model for growth, and inadequate feedback mechanisms to facilitate citizen engagement and government account- ability.
... See More + This CPF succeeds the Ethiopia FY13-FY16 country partnership strategy (CPS), which was discussed at the Board on August 29, 2012. It also reflects lessons learned and resulting suggestions from the CPS completion and learning review (CLR), which is presented in this report. Following a decade of strong economic growth in Ethiopia, the CPF addresses the challenges of forging a growth path that is more broadly inclusive and sustainable. The CPF program will focus on: (i) promoting structural and economic transformation through increased productivity; (ii) building resilience and inclusiveness (including gender equality); and (iii) supporting institutional accountability and confronting corruption. This CPF adopts a spatial lens through which this five-year program will seek to deliver bold results and to tackle two of the greatest spatial challenges to Ethiopia’s quest to achieve lower middle-income status by 2025.
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Country Assistance Strategy Document 115135 MAY 22, 2017
The country partnership framework (CPF) for Brazil covers the six-year period from FY18 to FY23.1 The CPF is aligned with the objectives of the country’s development strategy as outlined in the Brazil growth strategy presented by the authorities and is rooted in the findings and recommendations of the World Bank Group (WBG) systematic country diagnostic (SCD) for Brazil, which contains an analysis of key constraints for inclusive and sustainable growth.
... See More + The CPF supports the country in making further progress on the WBG twin goals of eliminating extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity through a program that focuses on creating the conditions for faster job growth. The CPF reflects the priorities of the Brazilian authorities and the resources and capacity of the WBG to deliver against these priorities. The CPF is built around three focus areas: (i) fiscal consolidation and government effectiveness; (ii) private sector investment and productivity; and (iii) equitable and sustainable development. The CPF continues the strong focus on improved service delivery that was at the center of the previous strategy, including through the implementation of the large existing portfolio, but with a growing emphasis on new management models that promise to increase the efficiency and efficacy of the public sector in addition to safeguarding access for the poor.
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Country Assistance Strategy Document 113259 MAY 16, 2017
Cambodia has become one of the world’s leaders in poverty reduction and shared prosperity. Cambodia sustained an average growth rate of 7.6 percent in 1994-2015, ranking sixth in the world, and has now become a lower middle-income economy.
... See More + Cambodia’s success has ridden on employment creation, although labor productivity gains have been lower than in other fast-growing economies, partly due to lower capital intensity. Growth has also been driven to a large extent by the country’s rich and diverse natural capital which supports the livelihoods of millions of Cambodians. Going forward, Cambodia may not be able to rely on the same factors that drove strong growth and poverty reduction over the past two decades. Declining external competitiveness threatens the sustainability of garments and tourism and poses a challenge to economic diversification and moving up the value chain. A number of institutional, human capital, and, to a lesser extent, infrastructure constraints hamper competitiveness as well as the creation of a vibrant private sector in Cambodia. In light of these challenges and risks, areas of development for ensuring strong, inclusive, and sustainable growth with shared prosperity in Cambodia going forward were identified, based on analysis and consultations with stakeholders. The areas for development were ranked based on the impact interventions will have on maintaining strong and sustainable growth and achieving poverty reduction and shared prosperity, in terms of creating and enhancing households’ participation in better economic opportunities, the share of the population affected, and complementarity with other interventions.
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A severe slow-down in Afghanistan's economic growth characterized the period between 2012 and 2014, the so called Transition period leading to the 2014 election and handover of security responsibility to Afghan forces.
... See More + Afghanistan's economic malaise during this time can be attributed to the combined effects of the drawdown of international military forces and a sharp fall in associated international spending, reduction of aid, and increasing conflict and political instability. While aid fueled strong growth during the pre-transition period between 2007-2008 and 2011-2012, worrisome socio-economic dynamics already present intensified during the transition. Notably, the transition crisis magnified once again the many inequalities-between regions, cities and rural areas, rich and poor Afghans, and between men and women and girls and boys-that fracture Afghan society. The poorest and most vulnerable segments of the population benefited least from pre-transition growth, and the same groups suffered the most once the economy and the security condition deteriorated. This new edition of the Poverty Status Update series documents the evolution of poverty and socio-economic inclusion during the transition. It examines determinants of poverty and, with an eye beyond 2014, suggests policies to reduce vulnerability and inequalities.
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A severe slow-down in Afghanistan's economic growth characterized the period between 2012 and 2014, the so called Transition period leading to the 2014 election and handover of security responsibility to Afghan forces.
... See More + Afghanistan's economic malaise during this time can be attributed to the combined effects of the drawdown of international military forces and a sharp fall in associated international spending, reduction of aid, and increasing conflict and political instability. While aid fueled strong growth during the pre-transition period between 2007-2008 and 2011-2012, worrisome socio-economic dynamics already present intensified during the transition. Notably, the transition crisis magnified once again the many inequalities-between regions, cities and rural areas, rich and poor Afghans, and between men and women and girls and boys-that fracture Afghan society. The poorest and most vulnerable segments of the population benefited least from pre-transition growth, and the same groups suffered the most once the economy and the security condition deteriorated. This new edition of the Poverty Status Update series documents the evolution of poverty and socio-economic inclusion during the transition. It examines determinants of poverty and, with an eye beyond 2014, suggests policies to reduce vulnerability and inequalities.
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This program document presents the first Poverty Reduction and Inclusive Growth Support Operation (PRIGSO) in the amount of US$50 million equivalent to the Government of Mali (GoM).
... See More + The series is designed to support the implementation of the Growth and Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper for the period 2016‐2018, known as the ‘Cadre Stratégique pour la Relance Economique et le DéveloppementDurable du Mali’ (CREDD). The CREDD, the 2015 Systematic Country Diagnosis (SCD) and the FY16‐FY19 Country Partnership Framework (CPF) for Mali are all closely aligned. The PRIGSO series supports the policies defined in the CREDD by fostering inclusive growth and supporting pro‐poor decentralized transfers and social protection. This is the first credit in the proposed series, which consists of two single tranche credits. The operation has two development objectives: (i) foster inclusive growth and (ii) support pro-poor decentralized transfers and social protection. The operation supports the first objective through a set of mutually reinforcing reforms that should lead to increased revenue of poor rural households following reforms in the provision of agricultural subsidies, the micro‐finance sector, and the legal and institutional framework of rural land. This objective is also supported by improved maintenance of rural roads, an expansion of the mobile phone network, and increased competition in the telecommunications sector. The second objective is supported by increasing the coverage and reducing the fragmentation of the social protection system and by funding accelerated decentralization. This is an important element of the Peace Agreement as reflected by the commitment to almost double the share of spending by non-central entities (collectivités territoriales) from approximately 16 percent of the budget in 2016 to 30 percent in 2018. As governance remains an area of concern, the Authorities have been notified that good governance is an important prerequisite for the PRIGSO series as is maintaining macro‐economic stability.
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El presente documento propone, para lograrlo, enfocar los esfuerzos hacia: (a) mejorar las capacidades y activos productivos de la población con mayor rezago para que ésta cuente con un piso mínimo de bienestar que le permita acceder a mejores y mayores oportunidades; y (b) identificar inversiones clave a realizarse en sectores estratégicos, que detonen el potencial productivo utilizando las capacidades de la población actualmente en pobreza.
... See More + De esta forma podrá desplegarse un círculo virtuoso de mayor productividad con equidad.
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Nepal's recent history of development is marred by a paradox. Many countries in the world have experienced rapid growth but modest poverty reduction, as income has increasingly concentrated in the hands of the wealthy.
... See More + Nepal, however, has the opposite problem-modest growth but brisk poverty reduction. The country has halved the poverty rate in just seven years and witnessed an equally significant decline in income inequality. Yet, Nepal remains one of the poorest and slowest-growing economies in Asia, with its per capita income rapidly falling behind its regional peers and unable to achieve its long-standing ambition to graduate from low-income status.
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Ukraine has tremendous potential that has not yet been reached. Ukraine is endowed with intelligent, energetic, and entrepreneurial people; extraordinary fertile land; considerable natural resources; and a geographic location at the crossroads of Europe and Asia.
... See More + There is no reason why Ukraine, under the right conditions, should not be among the league of prosperous and successful nations. The circumstances today, however, are of course, still far from that ultimate target. Ukraine’s GDP per person in 2015 was $2,115, while the corresponding figure was $12,500 for Poland, around $9,000 for Turkey and Romania, and $9,800 for Malaysia, and $13,000 for Argentina. The flip side of the current circumstances is that if Ukraine is able to put in place the right conditions, it will experience a period of strong economic growth as it catches up and converges to the levels of income of more prosperous nations. This Systematic Country Diagnostic (SCD) for Ukraine is intended as an evidence based diagnostic of the constraints and priorities to reduce poverty and promote shared prosperity in a sustainable way. The SCD is intended as an evidence‐based and integrative analytical report, combining analysis of growth, inclusion, and sustainability. The SCD is not intended to be limited to expected areas of World Bank Group (WBG) engagement, but is instead intended to assess what the country itself should do to advance its growth, poverty reduction, and shared prosperity objectives in a sustainable way. This SCD is structured as follows. The next section covers the analysis of growth and sustainability. The third section covers the analysis of poverty and shared prosperity. The fourth section uses the analysis from the prior two sections to lay out the framework for the SCD, including the constraints and pathways to sustainable recovery and shared prosperity for Ukraine. The fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth sections elaborate on the pathways to achieving sustainable recovery and shared prosperity in Ukraine.
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