There is growing interest, worldwide, in the link between education systems and the production of skills that are valued in the labor market. With growth stagnating and unemployment soaring in much of the world, educators are being asked to focus more on producing skills that feed into labor...

This report examines how minimum wages affect the income poverty of workers, their households, and the state. It does not question whether or not the minimum wage is a good policy: instead, it focuses on the tradeoffs in setting the minimum wage level. It takes as a starting point the literature...

The subject of migration, and how best to manage it, has been moving up the policy agenda of the European Union for some time now. Faced with an aging population, possible skills shortages at all skills levels, and the need to compete for highly skilled migrants with countries such as Australia,...

Indonesia has made improving the access to health workers, especially in rural areas, and improving the quality of health provider's key priority areas of its next five-year development plan. Significant steps and policy changes were taken to improve the distribution of the health workforce, in...

This report demonstrated that the key for success in a globalized world lies increasingly in how effectively a country can assimilate the available knowledge and build comparative advantages in areas with good growth prospects and how it can use technology to address the most pressing...

A number of development partners, including the World Bank, have been actively supporting the health sector in Afghanistan since 2003-04 (1382 AC). Collectively, they invested more than $820 million between 2003 (1382 AC) and 2008-09 (1387 AC) and played key roles in supporting the government in...

This book seeks to achieve a balance, describing challenges that are being faced as well as developments that are underway. It seeks a balance in terms of the voices heard, including not just voices of the North commenting on the South, but voices from the South, and in concert with the North....

Since the early 1990s, the importance of chronic non-communicable diseases (NCDs) to global health has gained increased recognition. This report contains an agenda for action in response to the growing economic, social, and health problems posed by NCDs. Its objective is to enable the World Bank...

Historically, ensuring access to primary education has been seen as a predominantly public responsibility. However, governments are increasingly sharing this responsibility through a variety of subsidiary arrangements. Some governments are contracting services out to the private sector, to...

Undernutrition imposes a staggering cost worldwide, both in human and economic terms. It is responsible for the deaths of more than 3.5 million children each year (more than one-third of all deaths among children under five) and the loss of billions of dollars in forgone productivity and...