Transit-oriented development, commonly known as TOD, is a planning and design strategy that focuses on creating urban development patterns which facilitate the use of public transit,walking and cycling, as primary modes of transport and which supports vibrant, diverse and livable communities.
... See More + This is achieved by concentrating urban densities, communities and activities within a 5-10 minute walking distance from mass rapid transit stations (both bus and rail-based), developing quality urban space and providing convenient and efficient access to a diverse mix of land uses. TOD brings together elements of land use and transport planning, urban design, urban regeneration, real estate development, financing, land value capture, and infrastructureimplementation to achieve more sustainable urban development. Since TOD implementation can be complex, it is essential that cities understand the dynamics at play related to all citysystems- real estate economics, transit routing, infrastructure design, land use planning and zoning, the development of the local economy through urban regeneration, and urban design- toachieve the concept’s full potential. TOD, as a tool, enables city actors to negotiate through varying urban priorities to ultimately prioritize inclusion and resilience in an optimized environment. The World Bank considers these priorities as the bedrock of successful TODs.
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Working Paper 133001 DEC 19, 2018
Ollivier,Gerald Paul; Kalra,Bankim; Ghate,Ashish; Global Platform for Sustainable Cities; World BankDisclosed
Logistics is the network of services that support the physical movement of goods, trade across borders, and commerce within borders. It comprises an array of activities beyond transportation, including warehousing and storage, terminal operations (e.g. in ports and airports), express delivery, customs brokerage, as well as data and information management.
... See More + The global turnover generated by logistics exceeds USD 4.3 trillion. A country’s logistics performance is key to a country’s productivity and its attractiveness to outside investment. Inefficient logistics raise the cost of doing business and reduce the potential for international and domestic market integration, especially for developing countries. The gains from improving logistics performance are especially high in poorer countries. Increasing the logistics performance of a low-income country to the average performance of a middle-income country can increase trade by 15 percent or more. Better logistics allow more market access and can thus foster trade. Failing to move goods seamlessly hampers trade: a one-day delay at the border leads to an average 1 percent decrease in trade. Better logistics have a greater effect on trade promotion than tariff cuts: Logistics costs influence trade costs more than tariff barriers in most countries. Global production chains also depend on a robust logistics sector. Coordinating the various stages of product development, component production, and final assembly requires the ability to move goods across borders quickly, reliably, and at low cost. A lack of logistics infrastructure is one of the main reasons for companies to abstain from extending their procurement network to emerging and developing countries. This note summarizes information relevant to understanding the logistics infrastructure related bottlenecks impeding international and intra-regional connectivity along the Belt andRoad Initiative (BRI) economies. Data originates in the Logistics Performance Index, published by the World Bank.
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The forthcoming World Development Report (WDR) 2019: The Changing Nature of Work studies how the nature of work is changing as a result of advances in technology today.
... See More + Fears that robots will take away jobs from people have dominated the discussion over the future of work, but the World Development Report 2019 finds that on balance this appears to be unfounded. Work is constantly reshaped by technological progress. Firms adopt new ways of production, markets expand, and societies evolve. Overall, technology brings opportunity, paving the way to create new jobs, increase productivity, and deliver effective public services. Firms can grow rapidly thanks to digital transformation, expanding their boundaries and reshaping traditional production patterns. The rise of the digital platform firm means that technological effects reach more people faster than ever before. Technology is changing the skills that employers seek. Workers need to be better at complex problem-solving, teamwork and adaptability. Digital technology is also changing how people work and the terms on which they work. Even in advanced economies, short-term work, often found through online platforms, is posing similar challenges to those faced by the world's informal workers. The Report analyzes these changes and considers how governments can best respond. Investing in human capital must be a priority for governments in order for workers to build the skills in demand in the labor market. In addition, governments need to enhance social protection and extend it to all people in society, irrespective of the terms on which they work. To fund these investments in human capital and social protection, the Report offers some suggestions as to how governments can mobilize additional revenues by increasing the tax base.
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The labor force of each industrial country is being shaped by three forces: ageing, education and migration. Drawing on a new database for the OECD countries and a standard analytical framework, this paper focuses on the relative and aggregate effects of these three forces on wages across different skill and age groups over 2000 to 2010.
... See More + The variation in the age and educational structure of the labor force emerges as the dominant influence on wage changes. The impact is uniform and egalitarian: in almost all countries, the changes in the age and skill structure favor the low-skilled and hurt the highly skilled across age groups. Immigration plays a relatively minor role, except in a handful of open countries, like Australia and Canada, where it accentuates the wage-equalizing impact of ageing and education. Emigration is the only inegalitarian influence, especially in Ireland and a few Eastern European countries which have seen significant outflows of high-skilled labor to Western European Union countries.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8676 DEC 17, 2018
GEF’s 2020 strategy emphasizes support for the transformational change needed to create environmental impacts on a broad scale; more specifically, it supports broad coalitions of committed stakeholders and focuses on scalable activities.
... See More + Beginning in 2015, the GEF-6 Sustainable Cities program has promoted integrated approaches that address distinct, time-bound global environmental challenges. Urbanization has played a central role in the world’s economic growth, but it has also caused environmental degradation. The Sustainable Cities programprovides policy and governance support to facilitate integrated urban planning, management, and financing that leads to sustainable and resilient development and sound ecosystem management. GPSC is a partnership and knowledge platform that promotes integrated solutions and cutting-edgesupport for cities seeking to improve their urban sustainability. The platform comprises a diverse range of cities and organizations and has been operational since 2017. Each city faces various constraints to achieving its sustainability aspirations based upon its own unique contexts, such as population size and per capita income. Yet by coming together and combining their efforts,cities can leverage greater advantages through the power of partnership.
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Working Paper 132953 DEC 14, 2018
Global Platform for Sustainable Cities; World BankDisclosed
The forthcoming World Development Report (WDR) 2019: The Changing Nature of Work studies how the nature of work is changing as a result of advances in technology today.
... See More + Fears that robots will take away jobs from people have dominated the discussion over the future of work, but the World Development Report 2019 finds that on balance this appears to be unfounded. Work is constantly reshaped by technological progress. Firms adopt new ways of production, markets expand, and societies evolve. Overall, technology brings opportunity, paving the way to create new jobs, increase productivity, and deliver effective public services. Firms can grow rapidly thanks to digital transformation, expanding their boundaries and reshaping traditional production patterns. The rise of the digital platform firm means that technological effects reach more people faster than ever before. Technology is changing the skills that employers seek. Workers need to be better at complex problem-solving, teamwork and adaptability. Digital technology is also changing how people work and the terms on which they work. Even in advanced economies, short-term work, often found through online platforms, is posing similar challenges to those faced by the world's informal workers. The Report analyzes these changes and considers how governments can best respond. Investing in human capital must be a priority for governments in order for workers to build the skills in demand in the labor market. In addition, governments need to enhance social protection and extend it to all people in society, irrespective of the terms on which they work. To fund these investments in human capital and social protection, the Report offers some suggestions as to how governments can mobilize additional revenues by increasing the tax base.
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Approximately one billion people globally lack government-recognized identification. As a consequence, they face barriers to accessing critical services and exercising their rights.
... See More + Robust, inclusive, and responsible foundational identification (ID) systems2 can be transformative for a country’s development and for the welfare of its poorest and most vulnerable populations by enabling financial inclusion, the empowerment of women and girls, access to basic services, social safety nets, and political participation. Moreover, at a systemic level, leapfrogging traditional paper-based approaches in favor of digital identification systems can generate significant benefits across the public and private sectors by increasing efficiency and accountability (chiefly through the reduction of fraud, leakages, and waste in public programs) as well as driving innovation in service delivery (through the use of mobile or digital payments, for instance). As governments across the globe are implementing new, digital foundational identification systems or modernizing existing ID programs, there is an urgent need to develop accurate estimations of the associated costs. There are a handful of existing analyses that have attempted to estimate the overall cost of foundational ID systems: for instance, Gelb and Diofasi Metz (2018) estimate that it is likely to cost a low income country roughly 0.6 percent of GDP to build a foundational ID system, or about $4–11 investment per registrant for enrolment and credential issuance. The same study cites figures for a few countries suggesting recurrent costs of around 0.06–0.1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). As the authors point out however, few data points exist and these figures may not apply to different types of systems or to all countries.
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Approximately one billion people globally lack government-recognized identification. As a consequence, they face barriers to accessing critical services and exercising their rights.
... See More + Robust, inclusive, and responsible foundational identification (ID) systems2 can be transformative for a country’s development and for the welfare of its poorest and most vulnerable populations by enabling financial inclusion, the empowerment of women and girls, access to basic services, social safety nets, and political participation. Moreover, at a systemic level, leapfrogging traditional paper-based approaches in favor of digital identification systems can generate significant benefits across the public and private sectors by increasing efficiency and accountability (chiefly through the reduction of fraud, leakages, and waste in public programs) as well as driving innovation in service delivery (through the use of mobile or digital payments, for instance). As governments across the globe are implementing new, digital foundational identification systems or modernizing existing ID programs, there is an urgent need to develop accurate estimations of the associated costs. There are a handful of existing analyses that have attempted to estimate the overall cost of foundational ID systems: for instance, Gelb and Diofasi Metz (2018) estimate that it is likely to cost a low income country roughly 0.6 percent of GDP to build a foundational ID system, or about $4–11 investment per registrant for enrolment and credential issuance. The same study cites figures for a few countries suggesting recurrent costs of around 0.06–0.1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). As the authors point out however, few data points exist and these figures may not apply to different types of systems or to all countries.
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This paper examines the effects of robotization on trade patterns, wages and welfare. It develops a Ricardian model with two-stage production and trade in intermediate and final goods in which robots can take over some tasks previously performed by humans in a subset of industries.
... See More + An increase in robot adoption in the North reduces the cost of production and thereby impacts trade in final and intermediate goods with the South. The empirical analysis uses ordinary least squares and instrumental variable regressions exploiting variation in exposure to robots across countries and sectors. Both reveal that greater robot intensity in own production leads to: (i) a rise in imports sourced from less developed countries in the same industry; and (ii) an even stronger increase in exports to those countries. Counterfactual simulations indicate that Northern robotization raises domestic welfare, but initially depresses wages. However, this adverse effect is likely to be reversed by further reductions in robot prices. Northern robotization may lead to higher wages and welfare in the South.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8674 DEC 13, 2018
Artuc,Erhan; Bastos,Paulo S. R.; Rijkers,BobDisclosed
