The shares of manufacturing in value added and employment across a range of developing economies peaked at lower levels of per capita income compared with their high-income, early-industrializer precursors.
... Exibir mais + Based on the statistical analysis of input-output tables and firm-level data, the paper contributes to the discussion on whether this "premature deindustrialization" matters by showing that: a) the premature declining share of the manufacturing sector is largely not driven by a statistical artifice whereby what was earlier subsumed in manufacturing value added is now accounted for as service sector contributions; b) Some features of manufacturing that were thought of as uniquely special for development, such as scale economies, exports, and innovation, are increasingly shared by services sector firms. Yet, a given service subsector is unlikely to provide opportunities for productivity growth and job creation for unskilled labor simultaneously; c) Some high-productivity services serve final demand or derive demand from several sectors, while others are more closely linked to a manufacturing base.
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Documento de trabalho sobre pesquisa de políticas WPS8596 SEP 20, 2018
Nayyar,Gaurav; Vargas Da Cruz,Marcio Jose; Zhu,LinghuiDisclosed
This paper uses measures of cognitive and noncognitive skills in an expanded definition of human capital to examine how schooling and skills differ between men and women and how those differences relate to gender gaps in earnings across nine middle-income countries.
... Exibir mais + The analysis finds that post-secondary schooling and cognitive skills are more important for women's earnings at the lower end and middle of the earnings distribution, and that men and women have positive returns to openness to new experiences and risk-taking behavior and negative returns to hostile attribution bias. Especially at the lower end of the earnings distribution, women are disadvantaged not so much by having lower human capital than men, but by institutional factors such as wage structures that reward women's human capital systematically less than men's.
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Documento de trabalho sobre pesquisa de políticas WPS8588 SEP 19, 2018
Gunewardena,Dileni N.; King,Elizabeth M.; Valerio,AlexandriaDisclosed
Deposit insurance is a widely adopted policy to promote financial stability in the banking sector. Deposit insurance helps ensure depositors' confidence in the financial system and prevents contagious bank runs, but it also comes with an unintended consequence of encouraging banks to take on excessive risk.
... Exibir mais + This paper reviews the economic costs and benefits of deposit insurance and highlights the importance of institutions and specific design features for how well deposit insurance schemes work in practice.
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Documento de trabalho sobre pesquisa de políticas WPS8589 SEP 19, 2018
This World Bank Group Boards' calendar covers the period of September to November 2018, specifying the Boards' engagements, such as meetings and briefings.
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Relatório da Diretoria Executiva 130006 SEP 18, 2018
Risk reduction and disaster prevention are critical in curbing the large human and economic costs of disasters. The devastation caused by the 2017 hurricane season in the Caribbean has shown that years of development gains can be wiped out overnight if these gains are not resilient to shocks.
... Exibir mais + Likewise, any future economic growth that is built on vulnerable infrastructure and non-risk-informed policy frameworks is at risk. As the economies and populations of countries continue to grow, risk management needs to be placed at the very heart of long-term development strategies. Risk-informed development strategies are key to reduce risk and avoid future disasters; however, disaster risks cannot be fully eliminated. The question is not whether another major hurricane or earthquake will strike, but when. In a changing climate, governments must be especially prepared for more intense storms, more active hurricane seasons, heavier rainfalls, and stronger coastal floods. Further, continued urbanization and population growth, especially in coastal areas, are bound to magnify these impacts of climate change in the coming decades. Prevention and risk-informed development can ensure that exposure and risk are minimized, but all economies and societies will remain exposed to residual risk that needs to be considered and addressed. Thus, it is essential for governments to prepare in advance for future shocks; part of the challenge is to prepare the emergency response, in the hours and days that follow a disaster. Authorities can significantly improve the effectiveness of their emergency response by taking concrete measures: predefined evacuation routes and logistics, adequate and gender-sensitive shelters, and clearly defined roles and responsibilities for national and local authorities are all key for effectivedisaster preparedness. The pre-positioning of relief assets can ensure that the crisis response begins without having to rely on vulnerable transport infrastructure. Well-trained and efficientlydeployed search and rescue teams are key to saving lives in the immediate aftermath of an adverse event. But preparedness goes beyond the emergency phase to include the longer recovery and reconstruction phases, which also benefit from ex-ante preparedness. After the emergency phase – when the focus is on saving lives and providing humanitarian relief – comes the recovery and reconstruction period, during which basic services are restored, buildings and infrastructure are repaired, and livelihoods and economic activities are restored to their pre-disaster level or better. Governments can significantly reduce the impact of disasters on economic growth, livelihoods, and well-being by improving the effectiveness, speed, and quality of post-disaster recovery.
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Micro and small enterprise (MSME) insolvency is particularly likely to impact not only the business, but also the personal and family life of the owner-operator(s) of such businesses, raising particular concerns that apply much less frequently in the context of corporate insolvency.
... Exibir mais + This report refines and expands on the earlier deliberations of the Insolvency and Creditor or Debtor Regimes Task Force (ICR Task Force) regarding the optimal approaches for treating MSME insolvency. As a matter of terminology, it should be stressed that the term MSME in this report is intended to cover both individual natural persons and juridical business entities, unless specifically stated.This means that the size of an MSME differs from country to country and even industry to industry, making comparisons between jurisdictions and global standard-setting difficult. The scope of this report is designed to be nonprescriptive and dynamic across countries and contexts. Accordingly, this report aims to consider rescue and restructuring for all viable MSMEs, with the objective of preserving individual entrepreneurial initiative, including in the context of liquidation, and of preserving businesses that can continue to operate and add value in an economy. The final section of the report starts the process of examining the ICR Principles in light of the proposals made in this report.
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Governments of developing countries typically spend between 20 and 30 percent of gross domestic product. Hence, small changes in the efficiency of public spending could have a major impact on aggregate productivity growth and gross domestic product levels.
... Exibir mais + Therefore, measuring efficiency and comparing input-output combinations of different decision-making units becomes a central challenge. This paper gauges efficiency as the distance between observed input-output combinations and an efficiency frontier estimated by means of the Free Disposal Hull and Data Envelopment Analysis techniques. Input-inefficiency (excess input consumption to achieve a level of output) and output-inefficiency (output shortfall for a given level of inputs) are scored in a sample of 175 countries using data from 2006-16 on education, health, and infrastructure. The paper verifies empirical regularities of the cross-country variation in efficiency, showing a negative association between efficiency and spending levels and the ratio of public-to-private financing of the service provision. Other variables, such as inequality, urbanization, and aid dependency, show mixed results. The efficiency of capital spending is correlated with the quality of governance indicators, especially regulatory quality (positively) and perception of corruption (negatively). Although no causality may be inferred from this exercise, it points at different factors to understand why some countries might need more resources than others to achieve similar education, health, and infrastructure outcomes.
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Documento de trabalho sobre pesquisa de políticas WPS8586 SEP 13, 2018
Decades of services trade negotiations have produced a plethora of rules and commitments but limited real liberalization. One reason is a form of "negotiating tunnel vision," which has led to a focus on reciprocal market opening rather than on creating the regulatory preconditions for liberalization.
... Exibir mais + This paper makes four points. First, current trade disciplines are a useful but inadequate restraint on regulatory protection. Second, proposed disciplines on domestic regulation would add value but would not solve problems with the application of existing trade law and could create a hold-back problem in securing new liberalizing commitments. Third, insulating domestic consumers from international market failure is a precondition for further liberalization in many services sectors, and the relevant international bargain needs to be an exchange of regulatory commitments by exporters in return for market access commitments by importers. Fourth, such bargains create a risk of exclusion for nonparticipants that can and should be addressed. The paper illustrates these arguments drawing upon recent developments relating to data privacy, financial services, labor mobility, and competition policy.
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Documento de trabalho sobre pesquisa de políticas WPS8579 SEP 11, 2018
We investigate the association between entrepreneurship support programs and the likelihood of receiving funding for early-stage firms. We use a novel database of 2,887 early-stage technology companies from nine local ecosystems in eight countries that includes data about the founders’ demographic characteristics, educational background, work experience, and entrepreneurial history; we also use data about the start-ups’ history and evolution that follow their progress through support programs and early-stage funding.
... Exibir mais + We isolate two support interventions—acceleration and mentorship—that the literature has found to have a larger effect on a firm’s performance, and we test if such effect is supported from an ecosystem perspective. After accounting for variations in founder characteristics and business environment, we find a positive association between acceleration and mentorship by experienced founders and the likelihood of receiving funding, whereas other support programs, such as incubation, are negatively correlated with funding. We also find that some founders’ characteristics, such as increased education and experience, have a positive correlation with funding.
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An extensive literature on poverty traps suggests that high levels of poverty deter growth. However, a seemingly basic implication of the underlying theoretical models, namely that countries suffering from higher levels of poverty should grow less rapidly, has remained untested.
... Exibir mais + A parallel literature has suggested a variety of mechanisms through which inequality may affect growth in opposing directions. Because inequality and poverty are different aspects of the income distribution, inequality can also affect growth through poverty, an indirect channel that has not been explicitly analyzed. This paper contributes to fill both gaps. Using a large cross-country panel data set, it estimates a reduced-form growth equation adding both inequality and poverty to an otherwise standard set of growth determinants. Given inequality, the correlation of growth with poverty is consistently negative. In contrast, given poverty, the correlation of growth with inequality can be positive or negative, depending on the empirical specification and econometric approach used. Yet, the indirect effect of inequality on growth through its correlation with poverty is robustly negative. Closer inspection shows that these results are driven by the sample observations featuring high (but not extremely high) poverty rates. These empirical findings are consistent with the predictions from an analytical framework with learning-by-doing and knowledge spillovers, in which consumers cannot save and invest if their initial endowment is below a minimum consumption level.
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Documento de trabalho sobre pesquisa de políticas WPS8578 SEP 06, 2018
The quality of the public procurement system of an economy can have far-reaching effects on the private sector. This paper empirically explores several of these effects using two rich data sets.
... Exibir mais + An overall indicator of public procurement quality is created from the World Bank’s Benchmarking Public Procurement project that is then combined with firm-level data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys. The analysis includes more than 59,000 firms spanning more than 109 economies. The paper finds that firms in economies with good public procurement systems are more likely to participate in public procurement, face lower losses from shipping to domestic markets, and experience lower incidence of bribery than economies with poor public procurement systems. Similarly, better public procurement systems are positively correlated with more engagement in innovation, research and development, international certification, foreign technology adoption, and online connectivity.
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Documento de trabalho sobre pesquisa de políticas WPS8575 SEP 05, 2018
This World Bank Group Boards' calendar covers the period of September to November 2018, specifying the Boards' engagements, such as meetings and briefings.
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Relatório da Diretoria Executiva 129776 SEP 05, 2018
Women are not receiving equal benefits of the global development of oil, gas, and mineral resources, even as they shoulder a greater burden of the negative impacts.
... Exibir mais + Not only are men consulted more than women in the project-planning process, but men's access to subsequent economic benefits is much greater. The World Bank is supporting efforts to increase gender equality at every phase of development of extractive industries by removing constraints for more and better jobs for women, dismantling barriers to women's ownership and control of assets, and enhancing women's voices and agency.
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