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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Inclusive innovation seeks to expand access to essential goods and services, thereby improving quality of life, and enhancing economic empowerment through knowledge creation, acquisition, adaption, absorption, and deployment efforts targeted directly at the needs of excluded populations.
... See More + Inclusive innovation is of high relevance for the Chinese authorities, but the concept is new to the Chinese government from both conceptual and policy perspective. So far China has emphasized frontier innovation, yet has recognized the importance of inclusive innovation in addressing increasing disparity between the rich and poor. In China many efforts are being made in the domain of inclusive innovation, but there is no clear strategy and implementation plan. This report aims to help build awareness and set the stage for the potential implementation and operationalization of inclusive innovation policy in China and possibly in other countries. This report is presented in four Chapters and an Executive Summary. Chapter I presents the concept of inclusive innovation and why it is relevant for China. Chapter II discusses the current landscape for inclusive innovation in China. Chapter III presents international experience and examples. Chapter IV outlines some policy options for consideration by the Chinese authorities.
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The development objective of National Quality Infrastructure (NQI) Development Project for Ethiopia is to improve the delivery of quality assurance services to enterprises in the targeted sectors.
... See More + This project is structured around three components. 1) The first component, Strengthening Institutional Capacity for NQI Development, aims to strengthen the NQI institutions’ capacity to deliver effective and efficient quality assurance services to enterprises in the targeted sectors. It has the following subcomponents : (i) Technical Assistance and Training to Industries; and (ii) Strengthening Ministry of Science and Technology's (MoST) NQI Oversight Function. 2) The second component, Enhancing Private Sector Engagement, aims to support more active private sector involvement for the development of NQI systems in terms of creation of the demand for NQI services and increase of the number of private sector NQI service providers, in particular conformity assessment services. It has three subcomponents as follows: (i) Technical Assistance and Training to Industries; (ii) Technical Support to Private Sector NQI Service Providers; and (iii) Strengthening the Feed-back and Dialogue Mechanism. 3) The third component, Project Management and Monitoring and Evaluation, aims to support Project management and monitoring and evaluation through, inter alia, financing of Operating Costs, consultants’ services, goods and technical assistance.
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This note explores the way traditional banks and financial technology companies, or Fintech’s, interact in Africa and Asia, and their ability to offer innovative digital financial services that grant unbanked individuals access to financial transactions.
... See More + The Fintech sector is experiencing explosive growth in both continents, but while Asian banks have managed to efficiently integrate with Fintech solutions, African banks have been slower to adapt to this change. Still, the outlook for mobile banking remains positive, and its prevalence will boost the financial industry in both regions.
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Laboratory experiments were conducted to investigate how private and public information affect the selection of an innovation and the timing of adoption.
... See More + The results shed light on the behavioral anomaly called the “energy-efficiency gap” in which consumers and firms delay adoption of cost-effective energy and environmental innovations. The subjects chose between competing innovations with freedom to select the timing of their adoption, relying on private signals and possibly observation of their peers. When deciding whether to make an irreversible choice between safe and risky technologies, roughly half the subjects delayed adoption beyond the time indicated by equilibrium behavior -- confirming the behavioral anomaly found for environmental innovations. When they did adopt, the subjects gave proportionately more weight to their private signals than to the actions of their peers, implying they do not ‘herd’ on the latter. Nevertheless, when the subjects observed their peers’ decisions, they did accelerate the timing of their adoption despite not necessarily imitating their peers. This result occurred even when the payoffs were statistically independent, as if observing prior adoptions exerted ‘peer pressure’ on the subjects to act. The experimental results suggest that rapid dissemination of information about peer actions can speed up the diffusion of environmental innovations and improve selection among competing technologies.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS7955 JAN 25, 2017
Collaborations between science and industry are becoming increasingly important for the innovation process, in part because many new inventions are directly rooted in science, such as biotechnology, information technology, and new materials.
... See More + Yet there are several barriers that inhibit collaboration, including financing constraints, information asymmetries which prevent researchers and firms interacting, and transaction costs in negotiating collaboration agreements. Government subsidies may provide incentive to seek out these connections and may foster increased interaction between firms and scientific units. While such policies have been used for some time in the United States (U.S.), Western Europe, and Japan, they are now also becoming common in middle and high income countries that are attempting to close the gap with the most developed countries through innovation. Following a request from NCBiR, the World Bank conducted an impact evaluation of the in-tech program. In-tech funding provides additionality, largely funding projects which will not otherwise receive public funding and which will not otherwise be completed. Research and innovation is a long-term process, and the analysis measures outcomes 2.5 to 3.5 years after funding was received. This captures the time needed for the initial research activities to have occurred, but it can take more time for patents to be granted, publications to be cited, and new innovations to achieve commercial success.
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Ratings for the Technology Needs Assessment (TNA) Project for China were as follows: outcomes were satisfactory, risk to global environment outcome was moderate, Bank performance was moderately satisfactory, and Borrower performance was satisfactory.
... See More + Some lessons learned included: technology transfer requires the close collaboration of stakeholders, from both public and private sectors. The public sector plays a particularly important role in guiding climate technologies that provide public goods. Project design needs to find a good balance between technical depth and implementation practicality. Administrative approval process is another key factor affecting implementation. The Bank also benefits from engagement in this important project, and should be prepared for any uptake of technology adoption. The Bank has the convening power to share TNA experience and knowledge from China to other developing countries in the global technology transfer agenda. A national level project can serve as a capacity building and stakeholder engagement platform to maximize promotion of the sustainability agenda, for example, climate change.
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Implementation Completion and Results Report ICR3966 DEC 20, 2016
Over the last decade African advances in technology, especially in the home-grown mobile banking sector, have shown how innovation can contribute to economic development across the continent.
... See More + By understanding how the application of changes in technologies take hold globally—from initial discovery to new commercial products, processes, or services—private firms in Africa can better deploy investment into successful innovations to propel the continent’s productivity and growth.
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Despite the importance of trade facilitation as an area of trade and development policy, there have been very few impact evaluations of specific trade facilitation reforms.
... See More + This paper offers an evaluation of in-house clearance, a reform that allows qualified firms in Serbia to clear customs from within their own warehouse rather than at the customs office. The pooled synthetic control method applied here offers a novel solution to many of the empirical challenges that frustrate efforts to evaluate trade facilitation reforms. The method is used to estimate causal impacts on trade outcomes for 21 firms that adopted in-house clearance for import shipments. The program compressed the distribution of clearance times for adopting firms, but the estimated effects on median clearance times, inspection rates, and import value were not statistically significant. Tests for heterogeneous program impact do not indicate that the program affected adopting firms differently. Overall, the results suggest that the most evident benefit of the program for participating firms is reduced uncertainty about clearance times.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS7708 JUN 20, 2016
In this benchmarking report, a comprehensive benchmarking analysis of the participating Sub-Saharan African universities is conducted in terms of the key indicators identified and constructed for the purpose of assessing institutional performance and health.
... See More + While university benchmarking is a relatively new approach for most Sub-Saharan African universities that are participating for the first time in this process, it has been used as a diagnosis and planning tool by many universities to understand and track their own performance over time and against their local and global peers. For Sub-Saharan African universities, there is a need to take stock of outstanding achievements in the past, catch up with local peers in the near future, and set long-term targets on the road to becoming a top-performing university in the world. It is expected that this benchmarking analysis will serve as the basis for understanding the relative performance of Sub-Saharan African universities as well as a catalyst for these universities to take appropriate quality improvement measures and carry out effective strategic planning. For this phase of the Partnership for Skills in Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology (PASET) Regional Benchmarking Initiative, 28 out of the 48 Sub-Saharan African universities that signed up have participated and attempted the benchmarking exercise to different extents.
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The development objective of Sustainable Management of Agricultural Research and Technology Dissemination (SMARTD) Project for Indonesia is to improve the institutional capacity and performance of the Indonesian Agency for Agricultural Research and Development (IAARD) to develop and disseminate relevant and demand-driven innovative technologies, meeting the needs of producers and of the agri-food system.
... See More + This restructuring addresses the agreed modifications of the project activities, during the Mid-term Review (MTR) and subsequent implementation support missions, which include the addition of IAARD laboratories and field stations in new locations and budget allocations to enhance implementation effectiveness and efficiency gains. The changes will also ensure that the Project Development Objective (PDO) is achieved during the 21-month extended implementation period. Furthermore, the proposed modifications are in line with the changes in the Government Policy directions and priorities since the project was designed in 2011 and that of the World Bank's Indonesia Country Partnership Framework (CPF) for 2015 to 2018-2019 period addressing the agriculture sector investments. The closing date has been extended to June 30, 2019.
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What are the common characteristics among radicalized individuals, willing to justify attacks targeting civilians? Drawing on information on attitudes toward extreme violence and other characteristics of 30,787 individuals from 27 developing countries around the world, and employing a variety of econometric techniques, this paper identifies the partial correlates of extremism.
... See More + The results suggest that the typical extremist who supports attacks against civilians is more likely to be young, unemployed and struggling to make ends meet, relatively uneducated, and not as religious as others, but more willing to sacrifice own life for his or her beliefs. Gender and marital status are not found to explain significantly the individual-level variation in attitudes toward extremism. Although these results may vary in magnitude and significance across countries and geographic regions, they are robust to various sensitivity analyses.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS7691 JUN 01, 2016
The development objective of the Second Karnataka State Highway Improvement Project for India is to accelerate the development of the core road network through leveraging public sector outlays with private sector financing and improving the institutional effectiveness of the road sector agencies to deliver effective and safe roads to users.
... See More + The restructuring includes following changes: (a) extension of the loan closing date to December 28, 2018; (b) reallocation of loan proceeds across expenditure categories; (c) extension of the due date for two loan covenants; and (d) corresponding changes to the results framework and disbursement projections.
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