Four mutually supportive strategic pillars and related policy priorities would help Kazakhstan continue the structural transformation that stalled during the oil booms, in order to eliminate poverty and build a large and secure middle class: 1. economic management for diversification, to...

South Africa has come a long way since the advent of democracy, but its transition remains incomplete. The first three clauses of the Freedom Charter-the historic 1955 document setting out the central objectives of the democratic movement-were (i) the people shall govern; (ii) all national...

Reforms spurred by accession to the European Union (EU) boosted productivity and integrated Romania into the EU economic space. Gross domestic product per capita rose from 30 percent of the EU average in 1995 to 59 percent in 2016. Today, over 70 percent of the country's exports go to the EU,...

This first systematic country diagnostic (SCD) for Timor-Leste identifies key priorities to sustainably achieve the World Bank Group (WBG) twin goals of eradicating extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity in Timor-Leste. The Timor-Leste SCD presents a key set of priorities towards...

Croatia has made remarkable progress since independence, but daunting challenges impede the reforms required for sustainable development. In the space of a couple of decades since independence and its subsequent destructive war, Croatia has established a liberal democracy and a market economy,...

Solomon Islands is a small, remote archipelago in the South Pacific that faces a fairly unique set of development challenges. Solomon Islands is now at a critical juncture in its development trajectory. Neither the economic geography nor the present political economy of Solomon Islands is...

Liberia's status as a fragile state is deeply rooted in the political and economic exclusion practiced by the country's founders. Although they constituted just 5 percent of the population, freed American slaves and their descendants dominated the country's intellectual and ruling class from...

Landlocked and mountainous, Tajikistan has a young-and mostly rural-population of about 8.7 million and GNI per capita of USD 1,100 in 2016, making it a lower middle-income country. In 2016, Tajikistan launched the National Development Strategy of the Republic of Tajikistan for the Period Up To...

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is a classic example of the paradox of plenty, since the country is extremely rich in natural resources while its population is extremely poor. It is the largest country in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) with a total surface area of about 234 million hectares...