Social reforms typically require long-term, incremental policy changes. Traditional World Bank (WB) funding for discrete investments or technical assistance often had little broad policy impact. Even sector adjustment loans tended to be too inflexible and short-term to support ongoing social...

Since 2003, Peru has emerged as an open, rapidly growing economy. Over the review period of 2003-09, successive governments adopted policy platforms aimed at maintaining macroeconomic stability, furthering the private sector supply response, broadening participation in growth, improving social...

This article examines a specific form of state capitalism in Egypt under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, characterized by the central role of the military in economic affairs. Following the events of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, the Egyptian military not only secured its position as a key...

Arab oil exporting countries have been advised by the IMF to diversify their economies away from oil and that the way to do that is to adopt the ten principles of the Washington Consensus, which call for liberalization, deregulation and privatization. It is not clear how measures like these are...

Somalia is today among the poorest and most fragile countries in the world, facing myriad development challenges related to ongoing conflict, climate change, food insecurity, natural disasters, and displacement. Overlapping crises related to the COVID-19 pandemic, a prolonged drought, and...

This Country Program Evaluation assesses the development effectiveness of the World Bank Group's support to Morocco between fiscal year FY11 and FY21. The report evaluates the World Bank Group's contribution in solving four systemic constraints to Morocco's development: (i) lack of policy...

The Country Program Evaluation (CPE) will seek to assess how well the Bank Group-supported strategy was aligned with Georgia's main development challenges and how effective the Bank Group's support was in addressing these challenges. The evaluation seeks to identify lessons that support the...

Papua New Guinea has abundant resources in the form of oil and mineral wealth. But a complex set of factors, including systemic gender inequality, underinvestment in non-extractive sectors, and fragility compounded by vulnerability to disasters caused by natural hazards act as barriers to...

Rising inequality and widespread poverty, social unrest and polarization, gender and ethnic disparities, declining social mobility, economic fragility, unbalanced growth due to technology and globalization, and existential danger from climate change are urgent global concerns of our day. These...