The objective of the Social Protection Reforms Support Project for Tunisia is to strengthen institutional capacity to design social protection reforms and improve targeting of safety net programs.
... See More + The restructuring entails the following changes: (i) revision of project components, disbursement estimates, and implementation schedule; (ii) revision of the Results Framework; and (iii) six-month extension of the project closing date, from June 30, 2017 to December 31, 2017.
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The development objective of the Tamil Nadu Rural Transformation Project for India is to promote rural enterprises, access to finance and employment opportunities in 120 blocks of Tamil Nadu.
... See More + Some of the negative impacts and mitigation measures are includes : (i) use if high yielding varieties, hybrids may impact local diversity; (ii) increased use of pesticides in more quantities than desired leading to runoff into water bodies and polluting them and polluting environment,negative effects on health etc. soil degradation due to fertilizer use in more quantities (without soil testing) and high uptake of nutrients due to high responding varieties; (iv) adopt organic manuring practices as far as possible. Any chemical fertilizer application should be based on soil testing; (v) storage of grains andproducts like turmeric, redgram etc. needs drying to attain prescribed moisturelevel to avoid pest and disease infestation which may call for chemical use for management; (vi) storage facility should be wellventilated and free of moisture seepage. Care must be taken to ensure this during construction or renting of such facilities; (vii) use energy efficient equipmentfor processing (such as steam boilers in turmeric, steam roaster in cashew or aquapulper in coffee); (viii) organic produce may get contaminated when transported along with other non food commodities like fertilizers, pesticides etc.; (ix) lack of proper facilities toworkers may result in health issues; (x) increase the participation of women, especially those from the poor families; strengthen women in decision making;
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The objective of the Social Investment and Local Development Project for Armenia is to improve the quality and use of and access to community and intercommunity infrastructure.
... See More + Some of the negative impacts and mitigation measures include: the local construction and environment inspectorates and communities have been notified of upcoming activities; the public has been notified of the works through appropriate notification in the media and/or at publicly accessible sites (including the site of the works); waste collection and disposal pathways and sites will be identified for all major waste types expected from demolition and construction activities; mineral construction and demolition wastes will be separated from general refuse, organic, liquid and chemical wastes by on-site sorting and stored in appropriate containers; the approach to handling sanitary wastes and wastewater from building sites must be approved by the local authorities; before being discharged into receiving waters, effluents from individual wastewater systems must be treated in order to meet the minimal quality criteria set out by national guidelines on effluent quality and wastewater treatment; monitoring of new wastewater systems (before/after) will be carried out; construction vehicles and machinery will be washed only in designated areas where runoff will not pollute natural surface water bodies; and if the building is a designated historic structure, very close to such a structure, or located in a designated historic district, notification shall be made and approvals/permits be obtained from local authorities and all construction activities planned and carried out in line with local and national legislation.
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The objective of the Social Investment and Local Development Project for Armenia is to improve the quality and use of and access to community and intercommunity infrastructure.
... See More + Some of the negative impacts and mitigation measures include: the local construction and environment inspectorates and communities have been notified of upcoming activities; the public has been notified of the works through appropriate notification in the media and/or at publicly accessible sites (including the site of the works); waste collection and disposal pathways and sites will be identified for all major waste types expected from demolition and construction activities; mineral construction and demolition wastes will be separated from general refuse, organic, liquid and chemical wastes by on-site sorting and stored in appropriate containers; the approach to handling sanitary wastes and wastewater from building sites must be approved by the local authorities; before being discharged into receiving waters, effluents from individual wastewater systems must be treated in order to meet the minimal quality criteria set out by national guidelines on effluent quality and wastewater treatment; monitoring of new wastewater systems (before/after) will be carried out; construction vehicles and machinery will be washed only in designated areas where runoff will not pollute natural surface water bodies; and if the building is a designated historic structure, very close to such a structure, or located in a designated historic district, notification shall be made and approvals/permits be obtained from local authorities and all construction activities planned and carried out in line with local and national legislation.
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The objective of the Social Investment and Local Development Project for Armenia is to improve the quality and use of and access to community and intercommunity infrastructure.
... See More + Some of the negative impacts and mitigation measures include: the local construction and environment inspectorates and communities have been notified of upcoming activities; the public has been notified of the works through appropriate notification in the media and/or at publicly accessible sites (including the site of the works); waste collection and disposal pathways and sites will be identified for all major waste types expected from demolition and construction activities; mineral construction and demolition wastes will be separated from general refuse, organic, liquid and chemical wastes by on-site sorting and stored in appropriate containers; the approach to handling sanitary wastes and wastewater from building sites must be approved by the local authorities; before being discharged into receiving waters, effluents from individual wastewater systems must be treated in order to meet the minimal quality criteria set out by national guidelines on effluent quality and wastewater treatment; monitoring of new wastewater systems (before/after) will be carried out; construction vehicles and machinery will be washed only in designated areas where runoff will not pollute natural surface water bodies; and if the building is a designated historic structure, very close to such a structure, or located in a designated historic district, notification shall be made and approvals/permits be obtained from local authorities and all construction activities planned and carried out in line with local and national legislation.
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The objective of the Social Investment and Local Development Project for Armenia is to improve the quality and use of and access to community and intercommunity infrastructure.
... See More + Some of the negative impacts and mitigation measures include: the local construction and environment inspectorates and communities have been notified of upcoming activities; the public has been notified of the works through appropriate notification in the media and/or at publicly accessible sites (including the site of the works); waste collection and disposal pathways and sites will be identified for all major waste types expected from demolition and construction activities; mineral construction and demolition wastes will be separated from general refuse, organic, liquid and chemical wastes by on-site sorting and stored in appropriate containers; the approach to handling sanitary wastes and wastewater from building sites must be approved by the local authorities; before being discharged into receiving waters, effluents from individual wastewater systems must be treated in order to meet the minimal quality criteria set out by national guidelines on effluent quality and wastewater treatment; monitoring of new wastewater systems (before/after) will be carried out; construction vehicles and machinery will be washed only in designated areas where runoff will not pollute natural surface water bodies; and if the building is a designated historic structure, very close to such a structure, or located in a designated historic district, notification shall be made and approvals/permits be obtained from local authorities and all construction activities planned and carried out in line with local and national legislation.
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The objective of the Social Investment and Local Development Project for Armenia is to improve the quality and use of and access to community and intercommunity infrastructure.
... See More + Some of the negative impacts and mitigation measures include: the local construction and environment inspectorates and communities have been notified of upcoming activities; the public has been notified of the works through appropriate notification in the media and/or at publicly accessible sites (including the site of the works); waste collection and disposal pathways and sites will be identified for all major waste types expected from demolition and construction activities; mineral construction and demolition wastes will be separated from general refuse, organic, liquid and chemical wastes by on-site sorting and stored in appropriate containers; the approach to handling sanitary wastes and wastewater from building sites must be approved by the local authorities; before being discharged into receiving waters, effluents from individual wastewater systems must be treated in order to meet the minimal quality criteria set out by national guidelines on effluent quality and wastewater treatment; monitoring of new wastewater systems (before/after) will be carried out; construction vehicles and machinery will be washed only in designated areas where runoff will not pollute natural surface water bodies; and if the building is a designated historic structure, very close to such a structure, or located in a designated historic district, notification shall be made and approvals/permits be obtained from local authorities and all construction activities planned and carried out in line with local and national legislation.
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Central America has come a long way both in terms of economic and political stability. Increasingly the region is focusing on implementing productivity-enhancing reforms as well as supporting reductions in poverty and inequality.
... See More + This report analyzes recent trends in public social spending in Central America from 2007 to 2014, conducts international benchmarking, examines measures of the effectiveness and efficiency of social spending, and discusses the quality of selected institutions influencing this spending. We examine total social spending, as well as detailing its four components: public spending on the education, health, and social protection and labor (SPL) sectors. In analyzing public social spending, the report addresses three crucial policy issues: (a) how to improve the coverage and redistributional incidence of public social spending; (b) how to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of public social spending; and (c) how to strengthen the institutions governing public spending in the social sector. While based heavily on a series of recent analytical social spending studies in six countries in the subregion—Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama—this report also takes a broader regional perspective and includes some comparisons to countries in other regions.
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This document is the Performance and Learning Review (PLR) of the World Bank Group’s (WBG’s) Country Partnership Strategy (CPS) FY15-19 for Pakistan.
... See More + The four results areas of the CPS - Energy, Private Sector Development, Inclusion, and Service Delivery – remain consistent with the Pakistan One Nation One Vision 2025, and are aligned with the WBG’s twin goals of eliminating extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity. Gains have been made in many areas by the midpoint of the CPS period. Progress, albeit uneven, has been made in stabilizing the macroeconomic situation, reducing load shedding in the power sector, increasing tax collection as a share of GDP, improving doing business, and investing in disaster and climate resilience. This progress was largely supported by the completion of a successful IMF program, an accompanying series of development policy credits (DPCs), and a ramp-up of IFC long-term investments.All four of the CPS results areas remain relevant and largely on track with some changes proposed.The PLR proposes a one-year extension to the CPS to FY20 to align with the electoral cycle of the country and the IDA18 period.
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Country Assistance Strategy Document 113574 MAY 18, 2017
Vietnam is a lower middle income country with a GNI per capita income of USD 1,990 in 2015. During the review period, the country continued to experience rapid GDP growth averaging 5.8 percent, compared to 4.3 percent for the East Asia and Pacific region as a whole.
... See More + This is the first WBG Country Partnership Strategy (CPS) for Vietnam after it had become a lower middle-income country in 2009. The CPS was well aligned with the government’s objectives and stated development goals. It supported the implementation of the government’s Socio- Economic Development Strategy (SEDS, 2011-20) as this was operationalized in the Socio-Economic Development Plan (2011-15). The SEDS focused on structural reform, environmental sustainability, and the then emerging issues of macro-economic stability, with three core areas: promoting human resources and skills development, improving market institutions, and infrastructure development. Macroeconomic stability, and poverty was increasingly being concentrated in ethnic minority communities. In line with these concerns, the WBG through the CPS and the Progress Learning Review (PLR) focused on partnering with Vietnam to help the country achieve success as a middle income country with three focus areas: Competitiveness, Sustainability, and Opportunity. The CLR identifies a number of lessons, with which IEG mostly agrees. Most importantly: (i) Achieving selectivity requires strong engagement with the government. (ii) Comprehensive and programmatic engagement enhances the impact of engagement. (iii) Cross-sectoral, holistic approaches should be adopted and implemented more frequently. (iv) Expectations must be carefully calibrated when it comes to structural or transformational reform areas – also noting the importance of understanding the political economy aspects. (v) The WBG can use more effectively its convening power. IEG adds three key lessons from this CPS: First, in Vietnam going forward there is room for greater concentration of resources, including more emphasis on selectivity and with fewer but on average larger lending operations. The selectivity of the knowledge program could probably also be enhanced. Second, it is also important to pay more attention to the design of the results framework, including the balance between objectives and their under pinning outcomes and indicators, and for program additionally to be clearer, beyond the expected results of individual operations. Third, updating of the results framework at the PLR is an essential element of proactive program management and would need to be used effectively, including the continued monitoring and reporting of results throughout the CPS period.
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This report summarizes the challenges facing Armenian women at school and in the workplace with a special focus on STEM-related employment. As the world transitions to an increasingly digital economy, jobs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) will become a powerful driver of economic growth in the twenty-first century.
... See More + Changes in economic productivity brought through technological innovation require countries to focus on STEM; these high-productivity fields are increasingly in demand in the global economy, and are the key to competitiveness and gross domestic product (GDP) growth.Parity between men and women was one of the major achievements of socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and Central Cultural stereotypes about the types of work women should engage in and their responsibilities at home present the strongest barrier to equality between women and men in Armenia Asia. Although access, enrolment, and achievement rates are gender-equal in Armenia, women and girls tend to self-select out of STEM education tracks and career fields. At the level of education institutions, policy actions can address issues of access, information, biases, and system-wide changes to promote gender neutrality. In the short term, schools can engage teachers and students in discussions about the benefits of STEM fields of study and careers, encourage girls to embrace their interest in math and science, and provide positive role models of women who work in STEM careers. Policy action can help women make the school-to-work transition and promote their career advancement once they are working. At a national level, policy and regulatory actions can address systemic issues of bias, market failure, and information. Even at this level, some quick wins are feasible. The government may consider whether public information campaigns are needed to promote positive aspects of STEM careers to students in middle school and above, such as greater income, flexibility, and status, as well as launch a media campaign to promote and celebrate positive female role models in STEM. STEM sectors are an important source of growth for Armenia given the country’s geography and closed borders. Also, considering Armenia’s adverse demographic trends, lifting women’s participation in key growth potential sectors, including STEM, is increasingly critical.
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This paper discusses a randomized control trial to measure the short-term impacts of a skills intervention among urban youth in Sierra Leone at the onset of the Ebola crisis.
... See More + The intervention provided (i) technical skills training, plus on-the-job training; (ii) business skills training; and (iii) a mix of (i) and (ii). All groups received stipends and literacy and numeracy training. The findings support evidence that combining cash injections and skills training can stimulate employment and entrepreneurship. The program boosted household consumption and investments in housing and assets, thereby building resilience to the Ebola shock. The effects on cognitive and noncognitive skills were positive and heterogeneous. Youth with greater initial ability experienced more positive labor market and entrepreneurship investment impacts. Youth with less initial ability upgraded skills more extensively, although they channeled benefits into more consumption. These findings emphasize the role of basic safety nets and show that noncognitive tests may improve the targeting of skills interventions in fragile contexts. The results also confirm the age-malleability of noncognitive ability and suggest that, in low-ability contexts, the sensitive years for skill investments may reach into early adulthood.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8036 APR 25, 2017
Forced displacement -- defined as the displacement of refugees and internally displaced persons due to violence -- has reached an unprecedented scale and global attention during the past few years, particularly in the aftermath of the Syrian refugee crisis in 2011 and the European Union's migration crisis in 2015.
... See More + As this plight gained momentum, economics found itself unprepared to answer the basic questions surrounding refugees and internally displaced persons. Few economists or institutions were working on forced displacement. Economic theory or empirics had little to offer in articles published in journals. Data were scarce, unreliable, or inaccessible. Can economics rise to the challenge? Is the economics of forced displacement different from neoclassical economics? Can off-the-shelves models be used to study forced displaced populations? What is missing to do the economics of forced displacement? What are the data constraints that limit economists in this work? This paper provides a first nontechnical introduction to these topics. The paper argues that the modeling of utility, choice, risk, and information in a short-term setting is the key to address the problem. Neoclassical economics lacks some of the theoretical ingredients that are needed, but recent developments in game theory, neuroeconomics, and behavioral economics have opened new horizons that make the task of modeling forced displacement within reach. Empirics is clearly limited by the scarcity of quality data, but an example shows how welfare economists can start working with existing data. Economists have no excuse to maintain the status quo and should get on with the work on forced displacement.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8038 APR 25, 2017
Absent actual panel household survey data, this paper constructs, for the first time, synthetic panel data for more than 20 countries accounting for two-thirds of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa.
... See More + In this process, the analysis employs repeated cross sections that span, on average, a six-year period for each country. The analysis suggests that all these countries as a whole have had pro-poor growth. One-third of the poor population escaped poverty during the studied period, which is larger than the proportion of the population that fell into poverty in the same period. The region also saw a 9 percent reduction in poverty and a 28 percent increase in the size of the middle class. However, chronic poverty remains high, and a considerable proportion of the population is vulnerable to falling into poverty. There is some limited evidence that most resource-rich and middle-income countries have more upward mobility than downward mobility. Post-secondary education is especially strongly associated with higher upward mobility and less downward mobility, which holds to some extent for female-headed and urban households.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8033 APR 20, 2017
Crime rates in Papua New Guinea's capital city of Port Moresby are among the highest in the world. Few youth work, and good jobs are scarce. In 2013, the National Capital District Commission partnered with the World Bank to implement the Urban Youth Employment Project.
... See More + The project offers out-of-school and out-of-work youth two months of public works employment or, for academically qualified candidates, six months of classroom and on-the-job training. This paper presents difference-in-difference estimates of project impacts on participants' social and criminal behavior, 12 to 18 months after completion. The control group consists of observably similar youth living in areas not served by the program. Project participants became less likely to hang out with friends at night, have a best friend involved in crime, and have friends involved in fights or robberies. The program also increased subsequent employment rates, and significantly reduced aggressive behavior and gratuitous property damage. However, there is little robust evidence that the program reduced participants' engagement in or exposure to crime. The study concludes that the program had strong and healthy effects on participants' peer group and behavior, but more limited effects on the socioeconomic causes of crime.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8032 APR 18, 2017
