While all infrastructure public-private partnerships (PPPs) inevitably deal with financing, construction, regulatory, demand, and operational risks, among others, projects in disaster-prone regions must additionally develop commercially and technically viable solutions for managing disaster and climate risk.
... See More + This technical brief highlights key considerations and good practices for structuring resilient infrastructure PPPs through Policy and Legislation; Contracting and Disaster Risk Allocation; Procurement, Monitoring, and Payment; and Insurance. The brief was developed based on country case studies on Japan, India, and Kenya as well as a literature review.
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This mixed methods study investigates why fewer than one in five impact evaluations integrates a value-for-money analysis of the development intervention being evaluated.
... See More + This study distills four main insights from combined analysis of 33 semi-structured and unstructured interviews, surveys of 497 policy makers and 16 journal editors, and portfolio analyses of World Bank and worldwide impact evaluations. The study finds that low levels of training in cost data collection and analysis methods, together with a lack of standardization of the value-for-money assumptions (e.g., time horizons, discount rates, and economic or financial cost accounting) limit value-for-money integration into impact evaluations. Further eroding researchers' incentives, demand for cost evidence from the journals that publish impact evaluations is mixed. Ill-defined standards of rigor undermine editors' capacity to evaluate the quality of value-for-money analysis when it is integrated with impact evaluation evidence. Institutional funders of impact evaluations do not consistently demand that cost analysis be integrated into their funded evaluations. This study finds no evidence in support of the myth that policymakers do not demand cost evidence. Rather, it finds that researchers have few ways of knowing what kind of analysis policymakers need and when they need it. Improving the stock of impact evaluators who are cross trained in value-for-money methods, establishing standards in what constitutes rigor in costing, resolving methodological issues, and improving linkages between policymakers and researchers would lead to greater integration of value-for-money methods in impact evaluations.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS9041 OCT 15, 2019
A large literature documents the positive influence of a city's skill structure on its rate of economic growth. By contrast, the effect of a city's age structure on its economic growth has been a hitherto largely neglected area of research.
... See More + This paper hypothesizes that cities with more working-age adults are likely to grow faster than cities with more children or seniors. The paper sets out the potential channels through which such differential growth may occur. Using data from a variety of historical and contemporary sources, it shows that there exists marked variation in the age structure of the world's largest cities, across cities and over time. It then studies how age structure affects economic growth for a global cross-section of mega-cities. Using various identification strategies, the analysis finds that mega-cities with higher dependency ratios, that is, with more children and/or seniors per working-age adult, grow significantly slower. Such effects are particularly pronounced for cities with high shares of children. This result appears to be driven mainly by the direct, negative effects of a higher dependency ratio on the size of the working-age population and the indirect effects on work hours and productivity for working-age adults within a city.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS9040 OCT 15, 2019
This paper summarizes the latest update of the World Bank Bank Regulation and Supervision Survey. The paper explores and summarizes the evolution in bank capital regulations, capitalization of banks, market discipline, and supervisory power since the global financial crisis.
... See More + It shows that regulatory capital increased, but some elements of capital regulations became laxer. Market discipline may have deteriorated as the financial safety nets became more generous after the crisis. Bank supervision became stricter and more complex compared with the pre–global financial crisis period. However, supervisory capacity did not increase in proportion to the extent and complexity of new bank regulations. The paper documents the importance of defining bank regulatory capital narrowly, as the quality of capital matters in reducing bank risk. This is particularly true for large banks, because they have more discretion in the computation of risk weights and are better able to issue a variety of capital instruments.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS9044 OCT 15, 2019
This paper investigates how international regulatory and institutional differences affect lending in the cross-border syndicated loan market.
... See More + Lending provided through a foreign subsidiary is subject to subsidiary-country regulation and institutional arrangements. Multinational banks' choices between loan origination through the parent bank or through a foreign subsidiary provide information about these banks' preferences to operate in countries with varying regulations and institutions. The results indicate that international banks have a tendency to switch loan origination toward countries with less stringent bank regulation and supervision consistent with regulatory arbitrage, but that they prefer to originate loans in countries with higher-quality institutions related to financial market monitoring, creditor rights, and the speed of contract enforcement.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS9037 OCT 09, 2019
This issue focuses on Global Migration and features the following articles: Migration is Key for Reducing Poverty and Sustaining Economic Growth; How Labor Markets Fit Into the Global Migration Debate; How Big is the Payoff From Migration?
... See More + Evidence from a Lottery; Reducing Barriers to Migration Boosts Welfare in China's Rural Villages; Exposure to Immigrant Classmates and Natives' Test Scores; Exposure to Immigrant Classmates and Natives' Test Scores; How Aging, Education, and Migration Affect Wages; Highly Skilled Migration: "Brain Drain" or "Brain Gain"? Aging, Trade, and Migration; Global Spillovers of National Migration Policies; and Getting a Better Sense of How Long Refugees Have Been in Exile; Creating a Migrant Rights Database.
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