This report contains the World Bank Group Boards' calendar for the period of July to September 2017, specifying the Boards' engagements, such as meetings and briefings.
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Improving women's agency, namely their ability to define goals and act on them, is crucial for advancing gender equality and the empowerment of women.
... See More + Yet, existing frameworks for women's agency measurement -- both disorganized and partial -- provide a fragmented understanding of the constraints women face in exercising their agency, restricting the design of quality interventions and evaluation of their impact. This paper proposes a multidisciplinary framework containing the three critical dimensions of agency: goal-setting, perceived control and ability ("sense of agency"), and acting on goals. For each dimension, the paper (i) reviews existing measurement approaches and what is known about their relative quality; (ii) presents new empirical evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa: validating vignettes as a measurement tool for goal-setting, examining gender and regional discrepancies in response to sense-of-agency measures, and investigating what information spousal disagreement over decision-making roles can provide about the intra-household process of acting on goals; and (iii) highlights priorities for future research to improve the measurement of women’s agency.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8148 JUL 18, 2017
This paper discusses the challenges associated with collecting time-use data in developing countries. The paper suggests potential solutions, concentrating on the two most common time-use methods used in development settings: stylized questions and time diaries.
... See More + The paper identifies a significant lack of rigorous empirical research comparing these methods in development settings, and begins to fill this gap by analyzing data from Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index surveys in Bangladesh and Uganda. The surveys include stylized questions and time diary estimates for the same individual. The study finds limited evidence that stylized questions are more feasible (in terms of interview length) but also less accurate, compared with time diaries. These results are attributed to the relatively greater cognitive burden imposed on respondents by stylized questions. The paper discusses the importance of broadening the scope of time-use research to capture the quantity and quality of time, to achieve richer insights into gendered time-use patterns and trends. The paper suggests a path forward that combines mainstream time-use data collection methods with promising methodological innovations from other disciplines.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8147 JUL 18, 2017
Assets generate and help diversify income, provide collateral to access credit, alleviate liquidity constraints in the face of shocks, and are key inputs into empowerment.
... See More + Despite the importance of individual-level data on asset ownership and control, and that most assets are owned by individuals, solely or jointly, it is typical for the micro data on asset ownership to be collected at the household level, often from only one respondent per household. Even when the data are collected at the individual level, with identification of reported or documented owners of a given asset within the household, the information is still often solicited from a single respondent. Further, the identification of owners is seldom paired with the identification of individuals who hold various rights to assets, limiting understanding of the interrelationships among ownership and rights, and whether these relationships vary across individuals. Through a review of the existing approaches to data collection and the relevant literature on survey methodology, this paper presents an overview of the current best practices for collecting individual-level data on the ownership and control of assets in household and farm surveys. The paper provides recommendations in three areas: (1) respondent selection; (2) definition and measurement of assess to and ownership and control of assets; and (3) measurement of the quantity, value, and quality of assets. Open methodological questions that can be answered through analysis of existing data or the collection and analysis of new data are identified for future research.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8146 JUL 18, 2017
The main purpose of this paper is to argue that the optimal design of regulation of water and sanitation monopolies should be the outcome of a detailed diagnostic of the institutional constraints impacting the ability of the operator -- whether public or private -- to deliver the services.
... See More + Tailoring the regulatory processes and instruments to account for institutional and informational weaknesses stands a better chance of improving the performance of the sector than the adoption of imported standardized or pre-packaged regulatory tools.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8149 JUL 18, 2017
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) provides regular updates of the lending rates and spreads applicable to its financing products as set out in the terms of each product.
... See More + The structure of lending rates and spreads applicable to IBRD loans can be categorized into two groups: (i) variable spreads over a market reference rate (reference rate), and (ii) fixed spreads over the reference rate. The spreads correspond to the most prevalent loan product, the IBRD flexible loan (IFL), which is offered as either: (i) IFL variable spread or, (ii) IFL fixed spread. The IFL resulted from consolidating the previously offered loan categories - variable spread loan (VSL) and the fixed spread loan (FSL) - in FY08. Since April 2017, the frequency of calculating the average funding spread component of the IFL variable spread is on a quarterly basis. The calculation frequency does not affect the schedule of loan interest rate resets, which for most loans occurs on loan repayment dates twice a year.
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Since 2014, the World Bank Group (WBG) has formally mainstreamed citizen engagement in its strategy to end extreme poverty and share prosperity, building on 25 years of emerging practice and research.
... See More + In the early 2000s, the WBG issued guidance on multi stakeholder engagement to strengthen accountability relationships through citizen participation and ensure that the benefits of development projects reached the poor. Most recently, the development community has acknowledged that development outcomes improve when citizens participate in development, leading to the WBG mandate to mainstream citizen engagement across sectors and countries. The research described in this report, made possible through the Nordic trust fund (NTF), a multi donor knowledge and learning program on human rights for WB staff, aims to deepen understanding of citizen engagement in the development arena through in-depth study of three grassroots initiatives in which empowered citizens played a central role. The research complements existing approaches by explicitly adopting a human rights perspective as well as focusing on organic citizen-led initiatives rather than WBG- or client-initiated projects. In analyzing these cases, this report applies the framework of the World Development Report 2017 (WDR 2017): governance and the law to understand how citizens effectively disrupted the persistent power asymmetries that undermined development outcomes. This report analyzes citizen engagement to reduce corruption in service delivery in three diverse settings: in Afghanistan, improving education outcomes through community-based monitoring of schools; in Paraguay, monitoring sovereign wealth fund resources allocated to education to improve the infrastructure of marginalized schools; and in Serbia, promoting transparency and the integrity of physicians to reduce corruption in the health sector.
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This paper presents a bird’s eye overview of the investment policy and promotion (IPP) logical framework developed by the trade and competitiveness global practice of the WBG to address the challenge of how countries can use foreign direct investment (FDI) to advance their economic development.
... See More + The report sets out three key propositions: i.e. (i) that investment policy should aim not to choose between but connect domestic and foreign investors, (ii) that investment policy making should be based on the whole investment cycle going beyond promotion and (iii) that not all FDI is the same nor has the same development impacts. This sets out the logical framework for a concrete investment policy and promotion intervention in a time of globalization that will yield measurable results.
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This paper looks at the impact of members' ability to switch pension fund provider and /or portfolio on the allocation of pension funds to long-term investments.
... See More + The level of annual turnover in pension fund portfolios was compared with the amount of short-term investments (using government treasury bills and bank deposits as proxy). The investment regulations around switching and other market conduct were then considered. The paper finds that greater movements between pension fund providers and between portfolios is linked to increased holdings of short-term and more liquid assets. Switching appears to be driven by competition, market structure, and investment advice, and, unfortunately, frequently results in poor investment returns for members. The paper makes six recommends for regulators. First, use administrative controls to prevent fraudulent switching between pension providers. Second, provide clear performance and cost comparisons to inform members' choice of provider/fund and encourage informed decision making, which is beneficial for members and the system. Third, supervise and control advertising and marketing (including reporting of performance periods) carefully, to avoid switches based on misleading advice. Fourth, control financial incentives for sales agents, so that switching advice is given in members' interest and not for commercial gain. Fifth, concentrate issuance in government securities, to create more liquid instruments. And sixth, conduct further research on the concept of a central liquidity pool to manage unexpected outflows.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8143 JUL 11, 2017
Trade growth has slowed sharply since the global financial crisis. U.S. trade data highlights that arm's-length trade —trade between unaffiliated firms—accounts disproportionately for the overall post-crisis trade slowdown.
... See More + This is partly because arm's-length trade depends more heavily than intra-firm trade on emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs), where output growth has slowed sharply from elevated pre-crisis rates, and on sectors with rapid pre-crisis growth that boosted arm's-length trade pre-crisis but that have languished post-crisis. Compounding such compositional effects, arm's-length trade is also more sensitive to changes in demand and real exchange rates. For example, the income elasticity of arm's-length exports is about one-fifth higher than that of intra-firm exports. Hence, post-crisis global growth weakness has weighed more on arm's-length trade than on intra-firm trade. Unaffiliated firms may also have been hindered more than multinational firms by constrained access to finance during the crisis, heightened policy uncertainty, and their typical firm-level characteristics.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8144 JUL 11, 2017
