This regional profile presents the Doing Business indicators for economies in European Union (EU). It also shows the regional average, the best performance globally for each indicator and data for the following comparator regions: East Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East...

Doing Business in Zanzibar 2010 is a new subnational report of the Doing Business series on the sub-Saharan African region, following the subnational Doing Business reports on Nigeria and Kenya. It measures business regulations and their enforcement in the region of Zanzibar, represented by...

South Asia experienced a strong cyclical rebound in 2013Q3 growth but has since slowed again. The strong regional growth performance between July and September 2013 can be largely attributed to a temporary pick up in export growth, investment activity, as well as stronger agricultural output....

The report is organized as follows. Chapter one sets out the strategic context for Iraq, including the evolving political situation, macroeconomic context, and poverty and social conditions. Chapter two analyzes the trends in, and composition of, public expenditure, both from economic and...

This issue of the MENA quarterly brief assesses the macroeconomic performance of seven of the MENA countries: Egypt, Tunisia, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen and Libya. All of these countries experienced rapid economic growth during 2000-10, and suffered a sharp economic slowdown in the aftermath...

The World Bank seeks to assess the effectiveness of the privatization program which was initiated in Zambia in 1992 with significant assistance from the World Bank and other donor agencies. A review of representative sample of companies was undertaken in order to assess the effect of...

It is widely recognized in Chinese policy-making circles that the World Bank made a significant contribution to the country s enterprise reform in the 1980s. A major contribution consisted of bringing eminent international scholars and policy-makers to China, and in sending leading Chinese...

Twelve years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, domestic and international analysts of the transition economies by and large agree that the transition from central planning to a market economy has been exceedingly difficult. There has also been a major debate about the extent to which the...

Cross-border banking has been a critical part of Africa's financial history since colonial times. While the period after independence saw a wave of nationalization across the continent, with many of the colonial banks exiting, this trend was reversed in the 1980s with the arrival of financial...

This Africa's pulse newsletter includes the following The economic outlook for Sub-Saharan Africa remains robust, but growth is vulnerable to lower commodity prices and a slowdown in capital flows, the frequency and strength of growth spurts have increased, and growth has shifted the structure...